French Studies

In this highly accessible introduction, Brian Nelson provides an overview of French literature - its themes and forms, traditions and transformations - from the Middle Ages to the present. Major writers, including Francophone authors writing from areas other than France, are discussed chronologically in the context of their times, to provide a sense of the development of the French literary tradition and the strengths of some of the most influential writers within it.

An accessible and authoritative new history of French literature, written by a highly distinguished transatlantic group of scholars This book provides an engaging, accessible, and exciting new history of French literature from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, from Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre to Samuel Beckett and Assia Djebar. Original essays on carefully selected writers, works, and topics that open a window onto key chapters of French literary history.

This covers French literature from the earliest times to the present. It is also a particularly rich literature, espousing every genre from poetry, to novel, to biography, to drama, and adopting every style, including realism and surrealism, and expressing the views of all classes and political stands, with recently strong feminist and gay strains.

French theater has given us the works of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. In the Romantic era there was Alexander Dumas and surrealist works of Alfred Jarry, and the Theater of the Absurd erupted in France with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Dictionary relates the history of the French theater through a chronology, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries.