The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry

Description

The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry is the most up to date and comprehensive survey of French poetry available. The poets discussed - all quoted in the original, followed by an English translation - belong to every period from the eleventh century to the present, and include Francophone authors from areas other than France. The goals of this Introduction are to provide tools for the analysis of French poems, while assessing ever-changing distinctions and hierarchies between verse and prose, forms and genres, and levels of style; and to give a sense of French poetry's endless quest for self-definition, by examining its ambivalent relations with political realities, philosophical ideas, and the achievements of other arts, notably music and painting. Accessible, wide-ranging and designed specifically for use on courses, this Introduction contains a useful glossary of poetic terms, and will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.

Mary Lewis Shaw is Associate Professor of French at Rutgers University. She is the author of Performance in the Texts of Mallarme: The Passage from Art to Ritual (1993).

'This is a solid piece of work, well researched and written with a real ear for poetry and its values.' Contemporary Review '... this book provides at one end the same time reliable reference - not least in its economical but comprehensive glossary - exemplary analytical method, challenging opinions and appetite-whetting glimpses of larger issues: all that one might wish from an introduction, and much more. And it makes absorbing reading.' Journal of European Studies 'It is of serious interest to teachers of French poetry, reminding us of what it is we teach and how we might go about doing so.' French Studies 'This is a pedagogically wide-ranging highly practical book. It provides readers with indispensable socio-historical, stylistic and rhetorical terms as well as assorted bits of useful information about a dazzling array of French poets, schools and movements from the Middle Ages to the present.' Nineteenth-Century French Studies