A History of French Literature: From Chanson de geste to Cinema - Hardcover

Coward takes us beyond 'literature' into the world of the best-seller and, beyond words, to graphic fiction and cinema. In the course of his account he maps the rise of the intellectual, from the time of Dreyfus to the divisions of the 1930s, from the Existentialists to the Post-Structuralists and beyond, and in so doing charts a progression from literary doctrine to critical theory.

Whatever the subject in hand, from the 'feminism' of the Middle Ages to the Feminism of the present, from the 'modernism' of the fifteenth century to the Modernism we associate with Proust and his contemporaries, Coward proves to be a fascinating and inspiring guide. Topics, themes and genres are clearly signposted so that the reader may follow the evolution of theatre, poetry or fiction as well as wider matters such as censorship and writers' rewards. The text is complemented by a fully comprehensive and reader-friendly index.