A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century

In this splendid essay anthology, Prendergast (Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic) gathers a stellar cast of scholars to provide a wide-ranging and thoughtful introduction to French literature. Each essay focuses on an author or a group of authors to illustrate the ways that literature grows out of and frames its historical context. Raymond Geuss’s essay on François Rabelais and Timothy Hampton’s on Michel de Montaigne set these writers’ texts against the 16th-century Wars of Religion; Steven Ungar’s essay on Céline and André Malraux places them in the context of early 1930s political instability. The selections discuss literary as well as historical context. Katherine Ibbett reflects that a crucial scene of eavesdropping in Madame de Lafayette’s 1678 La Princesse de Clèves “placed the public consumption of private conversation at the heart of this emerging genre [the novel].” Peter Brooks declares Madame Bovary the “only true ‘realist’ novel of the French nineteenth century”—in part because Flaubert remains completely neutral toward his characters and does not cast moral judgments on their behavior. Collections of essays are often uneven, but every contribution here brings the history of French literature to vivid life, providing rich insights and inviting well-repaid rereading. (Mar.)