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Over the last forty years, contemporary French poetry has been living in a state of crisis. Pronounced dead - or worse, irrelevant - it has sought to reassert its value, define its current specificity, and delineate its difference from the poetic practices of the past. But what are the defining contours of poetry today, given the sheer variety of practices that make up the contemporary field? Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Fe¿lix Guattari's discussion of minor literature, which explores the relationship between literature, language and power, Daisy Sainsbury argues that one unifying feature is the presence of a 'minor poetics'. Through close readings of three important poets - Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot and Christophe Tarkos - she examines how these three successive generations of linguistically experimental poets disrupt both literary and non-literary discourses, making the major minor, and redefining the political potential of poetic language in the process.Daisy Sainsbury is an independent scholar based in Paris.

In this book, Mairéad Hanrahan examines the shifts in political focus in Genet's writing, from the intimate fantasies of the early novels to the struggle for emancipation of the Palestinians in the posthumously published Un Captif amoureux. She argues that his texts have always been centrally concerned with power relations, challenging from the very beginning the opposition that traditionally confines the political to the public sphere. Genet's writing has always been political - but Hanrahan argues also that it was never solely political. On the contrary, a tension always existed for him between the poetic and the political.Genet's changing focus from the personal to the public is explored via the shifts in his practice of genre. Analysing how genre and politics are inextricably involved in Genet's writing, Hanrahan highlights a core paradox in its evolution. This writer who remained constant over the course of his life in his opposition to hegemonic power relations grappled throughout his work with the suspicion that his art may serve to shore up the very structures he unreservedly contests. Yet his writing also testifies, in both what it says and what it does, to the idea that literature is fundamentally at odds with the social order of the world.Mairéad Hanrahan is Professor of French at University College London.

The decades after World War II saw France's look, feel and lived realities transformed by spatial planning and modernization. Aménagement du territoire was a technical and administrative project, but was also political, moral and philosophical, as well as creative and imaginative. It was driven by a powerful obsession with the future and a belief that spatial planning could create the future in the present. During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958-69), it became a vehicle for reasserting France's place in the world after decolonization and expressing its grandeur as an advanced civilization.In Making Space in Post-war France, Edward Welch tracks the conceptual, ideological and discursive foundations of aménagement, mining an array of material from legislative texts to publicity brochures to investigate how visions of the future were articulated and inscribed on the ground as new towns, infrastructure and other expressions of modernity. He ranges across work by writers, filmmakers and photographers to explore how modernized landscapes and their effect on lived experience begin to permeate French culture during the 1970s and 80s, and how the legacies of spatial planning are negotiated politically, socially and culturally from the 1990s into the new millennium as the French state wrestles with the different pressures affecting its territory.Edward Welch is Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen.

While the 'venereal peril' of nineteenth-century France was responsible for thousands of deaths, much attention has focused on the range of social anxieties with which it was associated, including degeneracy, depopulation, state surveillance and public morality. In this interdisciplinary study, Steven Wilson redirects attention onto the body as locus of syphilis. Combining a critical medical humanities approach with close readings of medical and literary texts, Wilson explores the ways in which canonical and non-canonical writers of the time found a language to represent the diseased body. Drawing on scholarship from gender studies, theology, pain studies and word/image relations, this engaging study investigates what the language used in nineteenth-century French literature tells us not only about the pathological function and lived experience of syphilis, but about the role played by literature in representing disease.Steven Wilson is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Queen's University Belfast.

As the author of the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series, Émile Zola enjoys a reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century: but his essays on painting, and in particular his early championing of Manet, mark him out also as one of the most significant art critics of the age. Zola's Painters is the first book to explore the entirety of this body of work in its own right: some 150 texts written over thirty years. Robert Lethbridge, editor of the new Classiques Garnier edition of this corpus (two-thirds of which he unearthed himself from the newspapers in which they original appeared), now offers a radical reevaluation of Zola's writing on contemporary artists. The novelist's approval of the Impressionists, for example, must be seen in the light of an equal admiration for the Old Masters, which sits uneasily with Zola's modernist credentials as they are celebrated by posterity.Robert Lethbridge is a Life Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of French Language and Literature in the University of London. He is currently Hon. Professor at the University of St Andrews.

In this highly original study, Ewa Szypula reappraises the intriguing correspondence between the French novelist and his literary lover, the Polish countess Evelina Hanska. Whereas critics have used this correspondence primarily as source material for biographical and critical studies, this volume approaches the letters as a literary text in their own right. Vacillating between reality and fiction, Balzac essentially created his ideal correspondent through his letter-writing, attributing to Madame Hanska various qualities which she did not necessarily possess.In a series of close readings, Szypula explores the origins of this correspondence, analyzing its echoes and re-workings of Balzac's earlier relationships; shows how the letters help Balzac hone his literary skills and offer the chance to reinvent himself through playing different roles; and proposes the letters to Evelina as a prism through which to contextualise Balzac's subsequent storytelling.Balzac's Love Letters brings together correspondence and fiction to reveal crucial new insights into his literary imagination, whilst documenting an idealized romance which might be seen as his last great novel.

The award-winning writer Pascal Quignard (1948-) has published many texts and has collaborated with painters, musicians and filmmakers. Yet despite the popularity and critical recognition of his work, Quignard remains a discreet and fleeting presence in the current cultural landscape, sharing with other contemporary French writers the belief that literature is a form of self-effacement.In this first critical study in English, Léa Vuong offers a comprehensive survey of Quignard's still growing oeuvre by examining his specific attempts to produce disappearance through -- and for -- writing. His texts and collaborations appear as vanishing acts where the writer, like the figure on the Tomb of the Diver found in Paestum, remains suspended between presence and absence.

The French art novel, with its tales of artists, models and creative struggles, is often thought to be a specifically nineteenth-century phenomenon, which dies out by 1900. This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study argues that the art novel does not in fact disappear but rather undergoes a series of transformations in the early twentieth century, in step with radical changes in the visual arts of the period. Examining both well-known and all-but-forgotten novels, Shingler examines the ways in which they move on from their nineteenth-century predecessors, as the development of avant-garde movements makes questions of aesthetic value and authenticity ever more pressing; as changing gender roles increasingly put pressure on writers to acknowledge female creativity; and as the emergent art of the cinema comes to compete with painting as the primary visual reference point for writers.Katherine Shingler is Assistant Professor in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham.