French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

French Global
A New Approach to Literary History
Edited by Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman
Columbia University Press
September, 2010


Présentation de l'éditeur
Is it possible to reread the entire sweep of French literature from a world perspective? Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted both within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture.

The relationship between France’s national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of “Francophonie.” Boldly expanding such discussions to include a whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to the present. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, they offer a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns that inform the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.
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Christie McDonald is Smith Professor of French Language and Literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Her books include The Extravagant Shepherd: A Study of the Pastoral Vision in Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse, Dispositions on Music and Text, The Dialogue of Writing: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Literature, and The Proustian Fabric. Susan Rubin Suleiman is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Her books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, and Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde.