French Language & Literature

The Babel guide has 150 original reviews of books by over 100 authors from France, Quebec, North and West Africa, Belgium and Switzerland. Each review provides a kind of trailer for the work and is followed by an excerpt as a taster. It introduces big names of French literature such as Sartre, Camus, Colette and Duras, and a collection of less familiar writers, such as Driss Chraibi and Madeline Bourdouxhe. It includes a database of French fiction translated in the UK since 1950, with original titles and current prices. This is the third in a series of accessible and illustrated guides to world fiction available in English translation, aimed at journalists, academics, teachers and the ordinary reader. The reviews let potential readers have a idea as to whether a work might suit them.

French novels such as ""Madame Bovary"" and ""The Stranger"" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This new companion provides encyclopedic coverage of the French novel from its origins in the 16th century through the present day, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization. Written in a clear, accessible style, this is the only reference book of its kind to analyze the genre as a whole. A detailed introduction surveys the history of the French novel and discusses emerging trends. More than 550 in-depth entries, ranging from 300 to 2,500 words, cover novelists including Dumas, Voltaire, Flaubert, Proust, Camus, and Sartre, and novels such as ""The Three Musketeers"", ""Candide"", ""Les Miserables"", ""Remembrance of Things Past"", and ""The Plague"". The entries include bibliographies to guide further research; author biographies; synopses and analyses of major novels; genres and literary movements, including courtly love, dada, surrealism, and existentialism; historical events that have influenced French novelists, including the French Revolution, fascism, and the Old Regime.

The term "French theater" evokes most immediately the glories of the classical period and the peculiarities of the Theater of the Absurd. It 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 then the Theater of the Absurd erupted in rationalistic France with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Historical Dictionary of French Theater relates the history of the French theater through a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, trends, genres, concepts, and literary and historical developments that played a central role in the evolution of French theater.

Until recently, French women playwrights had received almost no critical attention and their works were for the most part completely unknown, but this volume is evidence of the important contribution they have made to world literature. It presents an extensive list of the dramatic works of more than 400 French women playwrights from the 16th through 19th centuries and includes brief biographical information, as well as publication, performance, and availability information for nearly 3,000 plays. The volume includes authors who are relatively unknown, as well as more canonical names such as Marguerite de Navarre and George Sand. The book is divided into four chapters, each devoted to a particular century with authors listed alphabetically. Each entry includes basic biographical information about the author, such as pseudonyms, place and date of birth and death, professions or activities for which the author is known, and other genres in which the author wrote. Plays are listed chronologically under the author's name.

This is the first publication in the Guides to Poetry Explication series to list explications of poetry in a language other than English. As with its predecessors in English and American poetry, its principal purpose is to lead the user to published explications of poetry by major poets. All periods in French literary history are represented, from the Middle Ages to such contemporary poets as Yves Bonnefoy and Leopold Senghor. Primary emphasis is on poets generally included in the canon of French literary studies. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR