Joie de vivre in French literature and culture : essays in honour of Michael Freeman

320 Pages·2009·3.28 MB·English

by  Freeman, Michael, Unwin, Timothy A., Harrow, Susan

Joie de vivre
in French Literature and Culture
Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman
FAUX TITRE
331
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises
publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman,
Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
Joie de vivre
in French Literature and Culture
Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman
Edited by
Susan Harrow and Timothy Unwin
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2009
Cover design / maquette couverture: Pier Post.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2579-0
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
Notes on contributors 7
Michael Freeman: joie de vivre, joies du livre 13
I Introduction
Susan Harrow and TimothyUnwin 17
II The joys of Romance
Rodney Sampson 35
III ‘Balades & Rondeaux nouueaux fort ioyeulx’:
joie de vivrein a Renaissance miscellany
Jane H.M. Taylor 51
IV Joie de vivre in Des Périers’sNouvelles Récréations
etjoyeux devis
John Parkin 65
V Comic interludes in French Renaissance prose romance:
Aldéno’s amours in Gerard d’Euphrate(1549)
Richard Cooper 81
VI Melons and wine: Montaigne and joie de vivrein
Renaissance France
Stephen Bamforth 99
VII ‘Une vie douce, heureuse et amiable’:
a Christian joie de vivrein Saint François de Sales
Richard Parish 129
VIII ‘Le carnaval autorise cela’: cruelty and joie de vivre
in the dénouementsof the comédie-ballet
Edward Forman 141
IX ‘I told you I was ill’: joie de vivreand joie de mourir
in Le Malade imaginaire
Noël Peacock 155
6
X The state of happiness?Ancient Sparta and the
French Enlightenment
Haydn Mason 177
XI Poetry and the discourse of happiness in
nineteenth-century France: the case of Vigny
Patrick O’Donovan 193
XII ‘Baisez-moi, belle Juju!’:
Victor Hugo and the joy of Juliette
Bradley Stephens 211
XIII Mallarmé etBachelard: la rêverie des mots
Hélène Stafford 225
XIV Ensor’s hyperbolic joie de vivre
Richard Hobbs 239
XV Joie de vivreand the will to winin the
literature of cycling
Edward Nye 255
XVI The joy of specs: the power of the gaze in the
novels of Sébastien Japrisot
Martin Hurcombe 269
XVII Rejoicing in the Other: France, England
and the case of Major Thompson
Gino Raymond 283
XVIII Joie de vivre:the afterlife of a phrase
Alison Finch 299
Michael Freeman: list of major publications 313
Index of names 317
Notes on contributors
Stephen Bamforth is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the Depart-
ment of French at the University of Nottingham. In collaboration with
Jean Céard, he is shortly to publish the first critical edition of the
Histoires prodigieuses of Pierre Boaistuau (Droz, Geneva). He has
written extensively on Béroalde de Verville, Renaissance court festi-
val and Renaissance medicine (most recently on Nicolas Abraham de
la Framboisière). His next major research project examines the con-
cept of the ‘merveilleux’before and after the Scientific Revolution.
Richard Cooper is Professor of French at Oxford University and
Vice-Principal of Brasenose College. He specialises in Franco-Italian
relations in the sixteenth century, as well as in Renaissance interest in
antiquities and court festivals. Earlier publications include a book on
Rabelais et l’Italie (1991), and on the literature of the Italian wars,
Litterae in tempore belli (1997), as well as an edition of Scève’s
album for the 1548 entry of Henri II to Lyon (1997). He recently
published editions of Marguerite de Navarre’s unpublished poems
(2007) and, with Geneviève Demerson, of Jean Du Bellay’s neo-latin
verse (2007). He is preparing a book on Renaissance interest in anti-
quities, an edition of Montaigne’s correspondence and Journal de
voyage, an edition of the 1549 prose romance, Gerard d’Euphrate,
and a further volume of Marguerite de Navarre’s writings.
Alison Finch is Senior Research Fellow in French at Churchill
College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Professor of the University of
Cambridge. She holds the Palmes Académiques at the Officier level,
has been a co-editor of French Studies (2002-05) and is the editor of a
new Modern Humanities Research Association Translation Series. Her
previous appointments include a University Lectureship in the
Department of French, Cambridge (1978-93) and Fellowships at Jesus
and Merton Colleges, Oxford (1993-2003). She is the author of
Proust’s Additions (1977), Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme (1984),
Concordance de Stendhal (1991), and Women’s Writing in
8 Notes on contributors
Nineteenth-Century France (2000). She is currently completing A
Cultural History of French Literaturefor Polity Press.
Edward Forman is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of
Bristol where he is Deputy Head for Teaching and Learning in the
School of Modern Languages. He completed his Oxford doctorate on
the comédies-ballets of Molière and his contemporaries under Jacques
Scherer before his appointment to Bristol in 1978. Since then he has
taught extensively and published widely on French drama, both
classical and modern, with a continuing special interest in the use of
music on the non-operatic stage. This musical interest has led him to
topics as widely varied as Racine’s Esther, Cocteau’s Œdipus Rexand
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
Susan Harrow is Professor of French at the University of Bristol. Her
research interests lie in modern poetry and narrative with a particular
focus on the interrelation of literary modernism and visual culture.
She is the author of The Material, the Real and the Fractured Self
(2004) and of a short study of Zola’s L’Assommoir (1998). Her study
of Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Represent-
ation will appear in 2009. She is currently editing Sublimely Visual:
The Art of the Text. She served as Joint Editor of Romance Studies
(1999-2008) and is currently President of the Society of Dix-
Neuviémistes.
Richard Hobbs is a Senior Research Fellow in French at the
University of Bristol, specialising in word and image studies. He was
a founder and subsequently Director of the Bristol Research Centre for
Visual and Literary Cultures in France. He wrote the first English-
language monograph on Odilon Redon (1977) and has since published
widely on French Symbolism. His research interests include contem-
porary art (Christian Boltanski), but lie chiefly in nineteenth-century
studies; he was editor of From Balzac to Zola: Selected Short Stories
(1992) and Impressions of French Modernity (1998). The topic of his
current research is the writings of nineteenth-century French artists, on
whom he has published case studies (Thomas Couture, Jules Breton,
Paul Gauguin). He is completing a book entitled Artists’ Writings in
Nineteenth-Century France.
Notes on contributors 9
Martin Hurcombe is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of
Bristol. He specialises in French cultural representations of war in the
early twentieth century. He is the author of Novelists in Conflict:
Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great
War (2004), the first English-language study of this popular genre,
and has also published articles and book chapters on French cultural
memory of the First World War as well as on political commitment
and French writers of the inter-war years. He is currently writing a
book on French cultural representations of the Spanish Civil War,and
recently co-edited a volume on the French author of crime fiction,
Sébastien Japrisot. He is an editor of the Journal of War and Culture
Studies.
Haydn Mason is Emeritus Professor of the University of Bristol and
was inaugural holder of the Ashley Watkins Chair of French. He has
written extensively on the French Enlightenment, particularly on
Voltaire (including a biography of the philosophe) and his links with
other writers and thinkers of the period, not only in France but also in
England, Scotland and Italy. He has also studied the relationship
between literary and socio-economic trends in the eighteenth century,
paying special attention to the growth in trade and wealth and its
cultural consequences. A former President of the International Society
for Eighteenth-CenturyStudies, he was alsoGeneral Editor of Studies
on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (1977-95) and Editor of Les
Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (1998-2001).
Edward Nye is Lecturer in French at Oxford University, and a Fellow
of Lincoln College. His research is mostly in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century French literature and history of ideas, particularly
the theory and practice of aesthetics. His publications include Literary
and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-century France (2000), (ed.) A
Bicyclette(2000), and (ed.) Sur quel pied danser? Danse et littérature
(2005). He is at present preparing a book on the eighteenth-century
ballet-pantomime in England, France and Italy.
Patrick O’Donovan is Professor of French at University College
Cork. He previously worked in a number of British universities and,
from 1989 to 1994, was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. With
Michael Freeman, he was for ten years an editor of French Studies.