This volume strives to cover those works most often found in high-school and undergraduate literature courses. Entries fall into one of four categories: biographical articles on novelists; plot synopses for selected novels; literary terms and genres (e.g., Feminism, Surrealism); and historical events (e.g., French Revolution) that influenced novelists writing in French. The first two categories account for the overwhelming majority of entries. Although well-known authors such as Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust are here, so, too, are contemporary novelists such as Raphael Confiant, Assia Djebar, and Antonine Maillet, hailing from Martinique, Algeria, and Canada, respectively.
Added by: englishcology | Karma: 4552.53 | Fiction literature | 20 August 2008
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This book traces the history of French literature from its beginnings to the present. Within its remarkably brief compass, it offers a wide-ranging, personal, and detailed account of major writers and movements. Developments in French literature are presented in an innovative way, not as an even sequence of literary events but as a series of stories told at varying pace and with different kinds of focus. Readers can thus take in the broad sweep of historical change, grasp the main characteristics of major periods, or enjoy a close appraisal of individual works and their contexts. The book is written in an accessible and non-technical style that will make it attractive to students and to all those who enjoy French Literature.
Timeless literary masterpieces--such as Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of
Notre-Dame (1831) and The Miserables (1862), Flaubert's Madame Bovary
(1857), and Camus' The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947)--have been
the subject of copious literary criticism since their publications.
This volume has been developed specifically to help students and
general readers reach a deeper understanding of eight French novels,
enabling them to develop a true appreciation for why the works have
been regarded as masterpieces. Lucid yet challenging literary analysis
focuses on plot and character development, themes, style, and
biographical and historical context.
By giving rise to new ideologies that in time transformed the political structure of much of the world, the American and French Revolutions stand as two of the most important political events in global history. The American establishment of a republican government, and the gradual expansion of democracy that ensued, altered traditional political and social thought, thus shaping the later French Revolution and creating the core ethic of later American political values. The Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution, as later spread by the armies of Napoleon, dissolved most traditional European notions of political authority. This encyclopedia offers current, detailed information on the people, events, movements, and ideas that defined the revolutions in France and America, as well as in other parts of the world during the late eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions........