Jules LaForgue and poetic innovation

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Giannalberto Bendazzi

"... Its encyclopedic style will find it a place in the library of everyone interested in the subject." — Kirkus Reviews. "Enthusiastically recommended as both a fascinating story and an incredible reference resource for both scholars and aficionados of the art of film." —Choice. "Although animation has finally begun to be thought worthy of serious attention, the spate of books on it in recent years has focused primarily on commercial Hollywood animation. Bendazzi ambitiously attempts to fill the gap. He covers more than a century's worth of animation, from the 1888 th{‚}e{ƒ}atre optique (a device for projecting moving painted images that predates motion picture pioneers Edison and Lumi{Š}ere) to today's cutting edge computer-animation technology. He covers American animation, of course, but also describes developments in more than 70 other countries, in many of which animation emerged more as an art form than a box office draw. His work is not without shortcomings: the writing (the translation, anyway) is occasionally awkward, and despite or because of its exhaustive depth and scholarly approach, the text seldom conveys the delightfulness that makes the best cartoons so compelling. Carping aside, this valuable effort, already well received in France and Italy, promises to be the basic reference on its subject for some time to come." -- Gordon Flagg , Booklist review.

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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.

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Robin Blaser

"Spanning four decades of meditation on the avant-garde in poetry, art, and philosophy, the essays collected in The Fire reveal Robin Blaser's strikingly fresh perspective on "New American" poets, deconstructive philosophies, current events, and the state of humanities now. His response to the cultural and political events of his time has been to construct a poetic voice that offers a singular perspective on a shareable world - and to pose that voice alongside others as a source of countermemory and potential agency. Conceived as conversations, these essays brilliantly reflect that ethos as they re-read the cultural events of the past fifty years."--Publisher description.

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John Skinner

Professor John Skinner analyzes the prose narratives of Tobias George Smollett (1721-71) and their place in the development of the novel in Constructions of Smollett: A Study in Genre and Gender. Moved by the fact that Smollett is now considered beneath the acquaintance of the common English reader and risks becoming the first major English novelist to have passed from widespread popularity to antiquarian status without an intermediate stage of critical esteem, Skinner set out to formulate a major revaluation of the writer. Constructions of Smollett begins with a brief historical survey of critical response to the author before arguing that the author has been unfairly judged by the standards of the traditional realist novel. Chapter 1 discusses Roderick Random, using both traditional and modern approaches to autobiography, while chapter 2 considers Peregrine Pickle in the light of Bakhtinian carnival and modern games theory. The third chapter concentrates on Smollett's fundamental importance as a satirist with particular reference to his less popular works: Ferdinand Count Fathom, Sir Launcelot Greaves, and The Life and Adventures of an Atom. After a final section which examines the various roles of the journey in Humphry Clinker and the Travels through France and Italy, the Conclusion juxtaposes issues of genre and gender through an analysis of Smollett's constructions of femininity.