French Field Examination - Research Guide

Critics and scholars have long argued that the Renaissance was the period that gave rise to the modern individual. The Gargantuan Polity examines political, legal, theological, and literary texts in the late Middle Ages, to show how individuals were defined by contracts of mutual obligation, which allowed rulers to hold power due to approval of their subjects. Noting how the relationship between rulers and individuals changed with the rise of absolute monarchy, Michael Randall provides significant insight into Renaissance culture and politics by showing how individuals went from being understood in terms of their objective relations with the community to subjective beings. By studying this evolution, he challenges the argument that subjectivity enabled modern political autonomy to come into existence, and instead argues that subjectivity might have disempowered the outwardly directed and highly political individuals of the late Middle Ages. A profound and detailed study of one of the most drastic periods of change, The Gargantuan Polity will be of interest to scholars of French literature, the Renaissance, and intellectual history.

In this book Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected both by rhetorical conventions and by the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry. Focusing on a wide range of discourses on gender issues - misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical - Gray reveals the extent to which these marginalised texts reflect literary concerns rather than social reality. He then moves from a close analysis of the rhetorical factor in the Querelle des femmes to consider ways in which writing, as a textual phenomenon, inscribes its own, sometimes ambiguous, meaning. Gray offers richly-detailed readings of writing by Rabelais, Jean Flore, Montaigne, Louise Labe, Pernette du Guillet and Marie de Gournay among others, challenging the inherent anachronism of those forms of criticism that fail to take account of the rhetorical and cultural conditions of the period.

In this collection of rhymed, metrical translations of selected poems by three of France's and Western literature's most gifted and prolific poets, Norman R. Shapiro presents English versions of works by Clement Marot (1496-1544), considered by some to be the last of the medieval poets; Joachim Du Bellay (1525-1560); and Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585). The original French poems - more than 150 in all - and their new English translations appear on facing pages. Some of the poems are very well known, while others will be a new pleasure for many readers. In these faithful translations of the poetry of the three most highly acclaimed French Renaissance poets, Shapiro maintains the rhyme and metre of the original works. He adheres to the message of each poem yet avoids a slavishly literal translation to offer creative and spirited equivalents. For students and general readers of this volume, Hope Gildden's introduction, along with notes she and Shapiro provide on the specific poems, seek to enhance appreciation and illuminate historical and linguistic issues relating to these lyric poems.

This is the first wide-ranging theoretical study to investigate how sexuality underlies literary production in the French Renaissance. It examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and French Renaissance literature, and explores the issues of gender, the body, and repression through detailed readings of key literary texts.