The play differs from other farces at the time by employing dynamic characters like Alceste and Célimène as opposed to the traditionally flat characters used by most satirists to criticize problems in society. It also differs from most of Molière's other works by focusing more on character development and nuances than on plot progression. The play, though not a commercial success in its time, survives as Molière's best-known work today. Much of its universal appeal is due to common undercurrents of misanthropy across cultural borders.

    This poem was the first to introduce Lancelot as an important figure in the King Arthur legend.

    The long poem was the beginning of Cesaire's quest for negritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Cesaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Cesaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. Andre Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to C saire. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.

    Schindler, JrIn what is one of the greatest Catholic poetic works of our century, Péguy offers a comprehensive theology ordered around the often-neglected second virtue which is incarnated inhis celebrated image of the ‘little girl Hope'.

    Among the women’s most powerful weapons in their assault is laughter, but they also threaten literary and linguistic customs of the patriarchal order with bullets. In this breathtakingly rapid novel first published in 1969, Wittig animates a lesbian society that invites all women to join their fight, their circle, and their community. A path-breaking novel about creating and sustaining freedom, the book derives much of its energy from its vaunting of the female body as a resource for literary invention."A delectable epic of sex warfare . . . an extraordinary leap of the imagination into the politics of oppression and revolt." --Mary McCarthy

    Despite his renown, however, there are few comprehensive collections of his verse available and even fewer translated editions.Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions.Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo's bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.

    When told they must wait days for a bridge to be repaired, they are inspired - by recalling Boccaccio's Decameron - to pass the time in a cultured manner by each telling a story every day. The stories, however, soon degenerate into a verbal battle between the sexes, as the characters weave tales of corrupt friars, adulterous noblemen and deceitful wives. From the cynical Saffredent to the young idealist Dagoucin or the moderate Parlamente - believed to express De Navarre's own views - The Heptameron provides a fascinating insight into the minds and passions of the nobility of sixteenth century France.

    English translations accompany the original French text of Rilke's poems about nature, art, work, mythology, and mortality.

    Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.Houellebecq's debut novel is painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.

    In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugene Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.

    After Boris Godunov, they evolved into Pushkin's own unique, condensed transformations of Western European themes and traditions. The fearful amorality of A Scene from Faust is followed by the four Little Tragedies, which confront greed, envy, lust, and blasphemy, while Rusalka is a tragedy of a different kind--a lyric fairytale of despair and transformation. Here, James E. Falen's verse translations are accompanied by a first-rate introduction from Caryl Emerson, an equally distinguished Russianist, which emphasizes the cosmopolitan nature of Pushkin's drama, the position of Russian culture on the European stage, together with excellent analyses of the individual works in the volume. Falen's translations of Pushkin are widely admired and his OWC translation of Eugene Onegin is considered the best available. This collection is sure to interest both casual readers and students of Russian literature.

    To this gifted French photographer, who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 36, photographs were objects of wonder and mystery, even possessing a touch of the supernatural. "Photographs are not innocent." Guibert writes in one of the most provocative essays in Ghost Image, a collection of critical and autobiographical writings on photography translated for the first time into English by Robert Bononno. "They influence and...betray what is hidden beneath the skin. They weave not only lines and grids, but plots, and they cast spells....They are an impressionable material that welcomes spirits." Guibert, photography critic of La Monde for many years, himself weaves a spell with his many topics and moods, delineated in a continually unpredictable mixture of precise descriptions and poetic musing. Guibert recalls family members through the frozen reality of pictures taken at different times. He offers a compact history of the Polaroid, and informative remarks on noted travel journals resembling photography. He confesses to having betrayed an actress he photographed, and silently ponders whether certain pictures should arouse him, adding his views on the differences between visual erotica and pornography. His own occasional role as model causes ambivalence. A flurry of other incidents and thoughts - some real, others fantasy - crowd Guibert's pages as he struggles to fathom the essence of that which captures life. In an unforgettable conclusion, through his account of an enigmatic portrait and its strange fate, Guibert finally achieves the union of person and picture he sought. Ghost Image is a collection of beautifully and hauntingly written essays on what is and what lies behind any photograph.

    The Cid, Corneille's masterpiece set in medieval Spain, was the first great work of French classical drama; Cinna, written three years later in 1641, is a tense political drama, while The Theatrical Illusion, an earlier work, is reminiscent of Shakespeare's exuberant comedies.

    At the time, only the most prescient would have predicted the events that led to her extraordinary final novel Suite Française and her death at Auschwitz. Yet the clues are there in this astonishingly mature story of an elderly Jewish businessman who has sold his soul.Golder is a superb creation. Born into poverty on the Black Sea, he has clawed his way to fabulous wealth by speculating on gold and oil. When the novel opens, he is at work in his magnificent Parisian apartment while his wife and beloved daughter, Joy, spend his money at their villa in Biarritz. But Golder’s security is fragile. For years he has defended his business interests from cut-throat competitors. Now his health is beginning to show the strain. As his body betrays him, so too do his wife and child, leaving him to decide which to pursue: revenge or altruism?Available for the first time since 1930, David Golder is a page-turningly chilling and brilliant portrait of the frenzied capitalism of the 1920s and a universal parable about the mirage of wealth.

    The play depicts an authoritarian regime and the play's central character, the young Antigone, mirrored the predicament of the French people in the grips of tyranny. One of the masterpieces of the modern French stage.