Books in the Cambridge Studies in French series

This is a new account of the prose fiction of Samuel Beckett from Murphy (1938) to Worstward Ho (1983). Drawing on contemporary literary theory, the book rejects the idea that Beckett is an author committed to expressing a particular view of the world.

This 1991 book examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the literature of the French Renaissance by exploring the issues of gender, the body, and repression in many of the key literary texts of the period, including Sceve, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, and Montaigne.

The most recently acknowledged - and the most private - of the masters of modernity, Paul Valery is perhaps the most radical and wide-ranging. This 1999 volume of essays by internationally recognised scholars offered the first comprehensive account of Valery's work in English or French.

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis explores the most seductive of all recent psychoanalytic traditions, that inspired by Jacques Lacan, whose radical questioning of previously accepted psychoanalytic effects has been continued implicitly by Michel Foucault and explicitly by Jacques Derrida.

This book offers a socio-historical reinterpretation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Breaking with recent trends in Proust criticism, Michael Sprinker draws upon historical scholarship to assess Proust's portrait of French society.

This major collection of essays on the Marquis de Sade, first published in 1995, encompasses a wide range of critical approaches to his oeuvre, including some of the most celebrated texts in Sade scholarship.

This book offers a new analysis of Surrealist collage, both as a technique of cutting and pasting ready made material, and as a subversive and creative strategy. Illustrating many of the collages under discussion, it offers close readings of individual collages and proposes a radical reassessment of Surrealism.

This study challenges the view that all courtly literature promoted the social status of women. Unlike previous books which focused on knights, it starts from the perspective of the woman reader/listener. Using reader-response theory, feminist criticism and recent historical studies, it suggests that romances taught gender roles, often inviting readers to criticise and resist them.