The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry

This book is a comprehensive survey of French poetry from the eleventh century to the present.

Mary Lewis Shaw (Author)

9780521004855, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 August 2003

240 pages, 4 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.3 x 1.7 cm, 0.39 kg

'This is a pedagogically wide-ranging highly practical book. It provides readers with indispensable socio-historical, stylistic and rhetorical terms as well as assorted bits of useful information about a dazzling array of French poets, schools and movements from the Middle Ages to the present.' Nineteenth-Century French Studies

The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry is a comprehensive survey of French poetry. The poets discussed - all quoted in the original, followed by an English translation - belong to every period from the eleventh century to the present, and include Francophone authors from areas other than France. The goals of this Introduction are to provide tools for the analysis of French poems, while assessing ever-changing distinctions and hierarchies between verse and prose, forms and genres, and levels of style; and to give a sense of French poetry's endless quest for self-definition, by examining its ambivalent relations with political realities, philosophical ideas, and the achievements of other arts, notably music and painting. Accessible, wide-ranging and designed specifically for use on courses, this Introduction contains a useful glossary of poetic terms, and will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.

Illustrations
Prologue. French poetry?
1. Verse and prose
2. Forms and genres
3. Words and figures
4. Poetry and politics
5. Poetry and philosophy
Epilogue. Poetry and the arts
Glossary.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]