Closely examining five French operas, this book reveals how and why grand opera sought to bring the past alive.

Examines metropolitan French-language representations of India from the period between the recall of Dupleix to France to the Second Treaty of Paris. This book explores what a European power, territorially peripheral in India, thought of both India and the administrative rule there of its rival, Britain.

This book investigates how French Romanticism was shaped by and contributed to colonial discourses of race. It studies the ways in which metropolitan Romantic novels—that is, novels by French authors such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, François René de Chateaubriand, Claire de Duras, and Prosper Mérimée—comprehend and construct colonized peoples, fashion French identity in the context of colonialism, and record the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. While the primary texts that come under investigation in the book are novels, close attention is paid to Romantic fiction’s interdependence with naturalist treatises, travel writing, abolitionist texts, and ethnographies. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination is one of the first books to carry out a sustained and comprehensive analysis of the French Romantic novel’s racial imagination that encompasses several sites of colonial contact: the Indian Ocean, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and France. Its archival research and interdisciplinary approach shed new light on canonical texts and expose the reader to non-canonical ones. The book will be useful to students and academics involved with Romanticism, colonial historians, students and scholars of transatlantic studies and postcolonial studies, as well as those interested in questions of race and colonialism.

Grounded in medical, juridical, and philosophical texts of 16th- and 17th-century France, this study tells the story of how the idea of woman contributed to the emergence of modern science. It challenges scholars to revise deeply held notions regarding the place of women in the early modern search for truth.

The Indian uprisings (1857–58) against British rule in India represent an iconic period within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Numerous works have considered these historical events from British and Indian perspectives, but none have yet questioned how they were viewed by Britain’s foremost colonial rival in India, the French. The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony at the hands its own colonial “subjects” allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance. The uprisings offered the attractive possibility that France could undergo a colonial revival in the wake of British defeat, thereby reversing the devastating losses inflicted upon France’s former empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Notable among these losses was Britain’s decision (in the Treaty of 1814) to permanently reduce France’s presence in India to five small trading posts scattered around the periphery of British territory. The extent to which to the French colonial imagination of the nineteenth century was shaped by the memories of such defeats forms a primary concern of this monograph. This investigation into French responses to the Indian uprisings reveals that French colonial discourse was determined as much by its visions of the colonized “other,” as by the dominance of their British rivals. Drawing from journalistic, historical, political, and fictional texts written during Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1852–70) and in the early years of the Third Republic (1870–1944), The French Colonial Imagination shows how the uprisings gave French writers the opportunity to speak out against the rapacity of British colonialism and its treatment of colonized Indians, while simultaneously constructing a competing colonial discourse that would justify further expansion in North Africa and South East Asia. Standing at a crossroads between the “loss” of Ancien Régime’s empireand the Third Republic’s ideological investment in overseas expansion, this understudied period of colonial history reveals the centrality of loss, fracture, and political emasculation as core preoccupations haunting the French colonial discourse in its quest to regain cultural and ideological ascendancy over its greatest political enemy.

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature identifies a documentary impulse in French literature that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century and culminates in a proliferation of factual writings in the twenty-first. Focusing on the period bookended by these two moments, it highlights the enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage either with current events or the historical archive. Specifically, it considers a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so, it contests the widespread narrative that twentieth-century French literature abandons the realist enterprise, and argues that writers instead renegotiate the realist legacy outside, or at the margins of, the fictional space of the novel. Analyzing works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, the book defines a specific documentary mode of literary representation that records, assembles, and investigates material traces of reality. The document is a textual, visual, or material piece of evidence repurposed through its visual insertion, textual transcription, or description within a literary work. It is a fact, but it also becomes a figure, standing for literature's confrontation with the real. The documentary imagination involves a fantasy of direct access to a reality that speaks for itself. At the same time, it gives rise to concrete textual practices that open up new directions for literature, by interrogating the construction and interpretation of facts.

This book examines the striking way in which medical and scientific work on hearing in 18th and 19th-century France helped to shape modern French society and culture. The author argues that of all the senses hearing offered the greatest resources for remodelling the idea of the universal human condition within the modern French historical setting.

In this study of seven exemplary comic writers from the Renaissance to the modern period, Professor Werner undertakes close readings of texts from each author while analyzing the larger vision of comedy that defines any one narrative oeuvre. From les Caracteres to A la recherche du temps perdu, from L'Education sentimentale to Mort a Credit, Stephen Werner argues for a revised view of comic fiction. Often underestimated by critics, this mode lies at the very heart of l'imaginaire francais by virtue of its creative force and its openness to modernity.

Matei-Chesnoiu examines the changing understanding of world geography in sixteenth-century England and the concomitant involvement of the London theatre in shaping a new perception of Western European space. Fresh readings are offered of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, Massinger, Marston, and others.

The study of war in all periods of prehistory and recorded history has always commanded the attention of historians, dramatists, poets and artists. The study of peace has, however, not yet gained a comparable readership, and the subject is attracting an increasing amount of scholarly research. This volume presents the first work of academic research to tackle this imbalance head on. It looks at war and peace through the ages, from the Classical world through to the 18th century. It considers the nature and advocacy of war and peace both from an historical perspective but also a philosophical one, particularly looking at how universal peace, which began as a personal philosophy, became over the centuries a political philosophy that underpins much of modern society's attitudes towards warfare and militarism. Roger Manning begins his journey through history by looking at the Greek martial ethos and philosophical concepts of peace and war in the ancient world; moving through the Roman empire's military advances, he explores the concepts of war and peace in the medieval world and the Renaissance, with the writing of Machiavelli and Erasmus; finally, his account of the search for a science of peace in the 17th and 18th centuries brings the book to its conclusion.