Aimer et Mourir offers a wide-ranging selection of essays that collectively address how, from the Middle Ages to the present, the notions of love and death get inextricably associated with the narratives that are women’s lives. Some of the essays tackle male writers’ representations that link women and, in particular, women’s sexuality, with death, resulting in the figures of the femme fatale, the woman in parturition, and the desiring vampire. A number of essays reiterate that women’s hyper-sexualized bodies have been used as a social construct and a psychological screen upon which to project a fear of death. The challenges to this pat reduction of “woman’s” domain come from the mostly women writers represented here—and they span from Marguerite de Navarre to Amélie Nothomb. These women writers rework the old formulae, giving us instead death-defying memories of love, love regenerative of language (as of bodies), love forcing the frontiers of death, or love creatively redefined within the parameters of death. Nor are these new narratives imagined as belonging to women alone but rather as attesting to a richer, more varied, and greatly sensitized human experience.

Originally published in 1857, "Les Fleurs du Mal" (English: The Flowers of Evil) is a volume of modernist poetry by Charles Baudelaire. The subject matter of these poems deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism.

A bilingual edition of the works of a 19th century French master. In The Cat, one reads: "Come, cat of mine, perch on my loving breast; / Come, beauty, lie in gentle guise: / Pull in your claws, and let me plunge, possessed, / Into your agate-metal eyes."

Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History traces the history of social policy in Canada from the period of First Nations’ control to the present day, exploring the various ways in which residents of the area known today as Canada have organized themselves to deal with (or to ignore) the needs of the ill, the poor, the elderly, and the young. This book is the first synthesis on social policy in Canada to provide a critical perspective on the evolution of social policy in the country. While earlier work has treated each new social program as a major advance, and reacted with shock to neoliberalism’s attack on social programs, Alvin Finkel demonstrates that right-wing and left-wing forces have always battled to shape social policy in Canada. He argues that the notion of a welfare state consensus in the period after 1945 is misleading, and that the social programs developed before the neoliberal counteroffensive were far less radical than they are sometimes depicted. Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History begins by exploring the non-state mechanisms employed by First Nations to insure the well-being of their members. It then deals with the role of the Church in New France and of voluntary organizations in British North America in helping the unfortunate. After examining why voluntary organizations gradually gave way to state-controlled programs, the book assesses the evolution of social policy in Canada in a variety of areas, including health care, treatment of the elderly, child care, housing, and poverty.

La Nouvelle-France offre-t-elle aux femmes un champ d'action élargi, comme le voudrait une certaine conception de l'histoire coloniale? Ce n'est pas ce que révèle l'analyse du partage des droits et des responsabilités entre époux, des secondes noces et des stratégies de survie économique des personnes veuves. « Maîtres et seigneurs » chez eux, selon le vœu de l'État, de l'Église et de la loi, les maris assument formellement l'essentiel des responsabilités professionnelles et patrimoniales du ménage. Lorsqu'ils meurent, leurs veuves doivent pour survivre apprendre à profiter de leur nouvelle capacité juridique, d'une certaine flexibilité des rôles féminins, de leur expérience professionnelle ou de leur douaire, qu'elles mettent en valeur seules ou avec l'aide de la parenté. Les veufs, souvent parents de jeunes orphelins et contraints par les normes de la masculinité, se remarient rapidement. Ils retiennent moins l'attention des autorités que les veuves, nombreuses, dom la figure tantôt attendrissante et tantôt suspecte se trouve parfois directement mêlée aux rapports de pouvoir entre la métropole et ses colonies nord-américaines.

The present volume looks at the relation between travel writing and cultural memory from a variety of perspectives, ranging from theoretical concerns with genres and conventions to detailed analyses of single texts. As befits the topic, the contributions roam far and wide, both geographically and historically. Some detail early Portuguese voyages of discovery, particularly to the East. Others depict encounters between Early, and not so early, Modern Western travelers and their Other interlocutors. Still others focus on travel writings as literature. Voyages and voyaging in literature form the subject of the last category of essays gathered here. Amongst the authors discussed are Fernão Mendes Pinto, Jean de Sponde, Furtado de Mendonça, Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, Elsa Morante, Ingeborg Bachmann, Sophia Andresen, Paul Claudel, Graham Greene, Valéry Larbaud, David Mourão-Ferreira, J.M.G. le Clézio, José Saramago, Michel Leiris, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The volume concludes with an essay by the French-Lebanese author Salah Stétié.

Surprisingly, there are few book-length studies available that approach the poems in Charles Baudelaireís collection on an individual basis. Understanding "Les Fleurs du Mal" fills this gap by providing students and serious readers with clear, scholarly "explications" to many of the most widely read of Baudelaire's poems.

Despite their importance, the poems of St. Thérèse of Lisieux are among the least known of her writings, previously available only in highly edited selections. Here for the first time in English is the complete collection of Thérèse's poetry, faithfully translated from the French critical edition by Donald Kinney, O.C.D. Also included are a preface by Jean Guitton, a general introduction to Thérèse's spiritual and poetic development, 6 photos, and individual introductions to each of the poems, indicating its background and significance. The volume closes with the French text of the poems and a fully linked index to their major themes and images. Together with the ICS Publications editions of Thérèse of Lisieux's Story of a Soul, Last Conversations, Letters, Plays, and Prayers, this is an indispensible work for all those who love the life and spiritual message of "the greatest saint of modern times."

Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism ate "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Bathes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach to the fundamental questions of meaning, interpretation, and the relationship between literature and criticism. In each of seven essays, a clear, precise, and detailed reading of the rhetoric of one of more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambuquities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity to differ from literal statement, and if "to differ" can also mean "to disagree," then the reading of the rhetoric of literature and theory here is an attempt to capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself.