Cartoons

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Steven Watson

From New York to San Francisco, Texas, Mexico, and beyond, the fascinating group of maverick poets and writers known as the Beats lived a life of wild experimentation, rebelling against the buttoned-up conformity of the 1950s. With text accompanied by more than one hundred photographs, The Birth of the Beat Generation brings their rebellion into sharp focus, tracing the connections between such figures as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke to reveal the legend that would make them into cultural icons.

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Winifred Woodhull

Recent years have seen growing interest in the politics, history, and literature of the postcolonial world. In the case of the Maghreb, scholars have examined the consequences of decolonization for both North Africans and Maghrebian immigrant communities now living in France, and international attention is currently focused on the rise of fundamentalism in Algeria and the implications of this for France and Algeria's domestic and foreign policies. Transfigurations of the Maghreb, which emphasizes the intersections of literature and politics, the local and the global, is at once a timely addition to contemporary debates about the Maghreb and a valuable contribution to the field of postcolonial studies in general. Transfigurations of the Maghreb addresses the question of gender in the context of postcolonial studies by examining the ways in which gender is inscribed in texts written about the Maghreb since the 1950s by both French and Maghrebian authors. -- from (June 23, 2014).

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Anne Holmes

"This is the first work in English to devote itself entirely to the poetry of Jules Laforgue (1860-1887). Based on a detailed study of manuscripts as well as printed texts, it analyses the evolution of Laforgue's poetic ideas as he understood it himself." "Anne Holmes presents a detailed investigation of Laforgue's changing poetic techniques in order to illuminate both his extraordinary poetic versatility and the significance of his adoption of free verse. Arguing that Laforgue is the great innovator in the use of free verse in French poetry, Holmes sheds light on his method of composition by means of close analysis of variants, and explores the precise nature of his experiment with interior monologue. She sets Laforgue firmly in the context of contemporary French poetry and highlights the influence on him of Walt Whitman and Impressionist painting. Comparison is also made with the work of T. S. Eliot, for whom Laforgue was a major influence." "Laforgue emerges from this study as a far more important figure in the evolution of French verse than has previously been thought. He stands as a great and self-consciously modern writer, close in spirit to his twentieth-century successors."--BOOK JACKET.

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Timothy Hampton

"Assessing the relationship between the emergence of modern French literary culture and the ideological debates that marked Renaissance France, Timothy Hampton explores the role of literary form in shaping national identity.". "The foundational texts of modern French literature were produced during a period of unprecedented struggle over the meaning of community. In the face of religious heresy, political threats from abroad, and new forms of cultural diversity, Renaissance French culture confronted, in new and urgent ways, the question of what it means to be "French." Hampton shows how conflicts between different concepts of community were mediated symbolically through the genesis of new literary forms. Hampton's analysis of works by Rabelais, Montaigne, Du Bellay, and Marguerite de Navarre, as well as writings by lesser-known poets, pamphleteers, and political philosophers, shows that the vulnerability of France and the instability of French identity were pervasive cultural themes during this period.". "Contemporary scholarship on nation-building in early modern Europe has emphasized the importance of centralized power and the rise of absolute monarchy. Hampton offers a counterargument, demonstrating that both community and national identity in Renaissance France were defined through a dialogic relationship to that which was not French - to the foreigner, the stranger, the intruder from abroad. He provides both a methodological challenge to traditional cultural history and a new consideration of the role of literature in the definition of the nation."--BOOK JACKET.