French

Edwidge Danticat's prolific body of work has established her as one of the most important voices in 21st century literary culture. Across such novels as Farming the Bones and Krik? Krak!, essays, journalism and writing for children, the Haitian American writer has tackled such important contemporary themes as racism, anti-immigrant politics, sexual violence and imperialism. With chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars this is the most up-to-date and in-depth reference guide to 21st century scholarship on Edwidge Danticat's work.
INCLUDES CHAPTER BY BINGHAMTON PROFESSOR OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES:
Scattering and gathering : Danticat, food, and (the) Haitian experience(s) by Robyn Cope

The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction andHomegrown Caribbean Feminism(s) is a comparative study of foodimagery in contemporary fiction by Guadeloupeans Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau,Haitian Edwidge Danticat, and Trinidadians Lakshmi Persaud and Shani Mootoo. RobynCope's key contention is that the past quarter century of Caribbean culinaryfiction engenders the Caribbean freedom struggle in two senses of the word:first, by imbuing the history of that struggle with gender sensitivity andspecificity; second, by dreaming up a new kind of creative, coalitionalCaribbean freedom struggle. Cope reads food imagery in Caribbean women'swriting not only for what it can teach us about the colonizer-colonized binary,but also in order to gain insight into power dynamics within the Caribbeanitself - between generations, ethnic and racial groups, religious and politicalaffiliations, social classes and sexual identities, and most especially betweenwomen. Cope's approach, part of theexciting new field of literary food studies, aims to recover stories thatcannot be told without food. By reading these works with and against one another,Cope honours the great geographic, linguistic, ethnic, racial, political andsocial diversity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean women'sexperiences with oppression and resistance. At the same time, her readingteases out Caribbean women's common longing for affirming coalition, symbolizedby commensality, that liberates without collapsing difference. In The Pen and the Pan, the sharedmeal and the shared struggle go hand in hand.

"From the end of the thirteenth to the first decades of the sixteenth century, Guyart des Moulins's Bible historiale was the predominant French translation of the Bible. Enhancing his translation with techniques borrowed from scholastic study, vernacular preaching, and secular fiction, Guyart produced one of the most popular, most widely copied French-language texts of the later Middle Ages. Making the Bible French investigates how Guyart's first-person authorial voice narrates translation choices in terms of anticipated reader reactions and frames the biblical text as an object of dialogue with his readers. It examines the translator's narrative strategies to aid readers' visualization of biblical stories, to encourage their identification with its characters, and to practice patient, self-reflexive reading. Finally, it traces how the Bible historiale manuscript tradition adapts and individualizes the Bible for each new intended reader, defying modern print-based and text-centred ideas about the Bible, canonicity, and translation."

The period from the 1970s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020 traces the region's contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative non-fiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of Anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean Literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms.

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, including the Occitanian region, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities. The contributors to this volume argue that because medieval texts were often read or sung aloud, voice is central for understanding the performance, transmission, and reception of work from the period across a wide variety of genres. These essays offer close readings of narrative and lyric poetry, chivalric romance, sermons, letters, political writing, motets, troubadour and trouvère lyric, crusade songs, love songs, and debate songs. Through literary, musical, and historiographical analyses, contributors highlight the voicing of gendered perspectives, expressions of sexuality, and power dynamics. The volume includes feminist readings, investigations of masculinity, queer theory, and intersectional approaches. The contributors interpret literary or musical works by Chrétien de Troyes, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Hue de la Ferté, the Chastelain de Couci, Jacques de Vitry, Christine de Pizan, Anne de Graville, Alain Chartier, and Giovanni Boccaccio, among others. Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song offers a valuable interdisciplinary approach and contributes to the history of women's voices in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. It illuminates the critical role of voice in negotiating culture, celebrating and innovating traditions, advancing personal and political projects, and defining the literary and musical developments that shaped medieval France.

Our global literary field is fluid and exists in a state of constant evolution. Contemporary fiction in French has become a polycentric and transnational field of vibrant and varied experimentation; the collapse of the distinction between 'French' and 'Francophone' literature has opened up French writing to a world of new influences and interactions. In this collection, renowned scholars provide thoughtful close readings of a whole range of genres, from graphic novels to crime fiction to the influence of television and film, to analyse modern French fiction in its historical and sociological context. Allowing students of contemporary French literature and culture to situate specific works within broader trends, the volume provides an engaging, global and timely overview of contemporary fiction writing in French, and demonstrates how our modern literary world is more complex and diverse than ever before.

In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading up to the French Wars of Religion, when a deliberately harmful and destructive form of satire appeared. This study examines both pamphlets and plays to show how this new form of humor emerged that attacked religious practices and people in ways that forever changed the nature of satire and religious debate in France. Hayes explores this phenomenon in the context of the Catholic and Protestant conflict to reveal new insights about the society that both exploited and vilified this kind of satire.

ALUMNI AUTHOR! Eliza Jane Smith is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of San Diego. B.A. French from Binghamton University.
Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as "literary slumming", or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugène François Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and Émile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. In The Quebec Connection, Julie-Françoise Tolliver examines the links and parallels that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences that marked their experience. Tolliver argues that the French tongue both enabled and delimited connections between these writers, restricting their potential with the language's own imperial history. The literary map that emerges demonstrates the plurality of French-language literatures, going beyond the concept of a single, unitary francophone literature to appreciate the profuse range of imaginaries connected by solidary texts that hoped for transformative independence. Importantly, the book expands the "francophone" framework by connecting African and Caribbean literatures to Québécois literature, attending to their interactions while recognizing their particularities. The Quebec Connection's analysis of transnational francophone solidarities radically alters the field of francophone studies by redressing the racial logic that isolates the northern province from what has come to be called the postcolonial world.

This book analyses the work of writers, journalists, and academic critics producing work during and since the end of the Algerian Civil War, arguing that literature-and ideas we have about it-can restrain our understanding of the world at a time of conflict and further entrench the polarized discourses that lead to the conflict in the first place.