Yale French Studies Number 134

This new volume of Yale French Studies both honors and adds to Edwin M. Duval's scholarship on the history and development of French Renaissance literature. Edwin (Ned) M. Duval's scholarship focuses on teasing out hidden structures and symmetries in the poetry and prose of the French Renaissance, a period when literature underwent radical changes. In honor of Duval's literary "sleuthing," the contributors in this issue explore the symmetries, as well as the dissymmetries, the fragility, ambiguities, and contradictions of French Renaissance literary production. This volume addresses evolving literary practices, innovations in genre, and intellectual developments in sixteenth-century France.

Number 137/138 in Yale French Studies, this collection of essays examines poetry in French by authors from across the Maghreb Although in recent years Maghrebi literature written in French has enjoyed increased critical attention, less attention has been paid specifically to the genre of poetry. The sixteen essays collected in this special issue of Yale French Studies show how the poem provides a uniquely privileged perspective from which to examine questions relating to aesthetics, linguistics, philosophy, history, autobiography, gender, the visual arts, colonial and postcolonial society and politics, and issues relating to the post-Arab Spring.

A reexamination of 1970s France as a decade of intellectual, cultural, and political consequence, both then and now Number 143 of Yale French Studies, "The French Seventies," reintroduces and reorients readers to a decade typically considered a period of disillusionment and malaise in the wake of the 1960s. This collection of essays, edited by Richard J. Golsan and Lynn A. Higgins, shows that the era was in fact a period of intellectual, cultural, and political ferment. It was a time not of spectacular leaps forward but rather of searching, regrouping, and cultivating trends that would flower in the 1980s and beyond, for better or worse. The volume offers interdisciplinary scholarly essays on history, film, national identity as articulated in the mode rétro, social and literary movements, and more. Interviews and personal history essays by major figures who actively participated in this decade add further dimension to this broad collection.

Focused on existentialism, this issue explores current writers, thinkers, and texts affiliated with the movement In 1948, Yale French Studies devoted its inaugural issue to existentialism. This anniversary issue responds seventy years later. In recent years, new critical and theoretical approaches have reconfigured existentialism and refreshed perspectives on the philosophical, literary, and stylistic movement. This special issue restores the writers, thinkers, and texts of the movement to their subversive strength. In so doing, it illustrates existentialism's present relevance, revealing how the concerns of the past urgently bristle into our own times.

Number 133 in Yale French Studies takes a new look at the themes in Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano's work This volume of Yale French Studies offers new perspectives on the work of the 2014 Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick Modiano. Including critical reassessments of themes that have informed, indeed haunted, Modiano's fiction from the outset, this collection of essays places the writer in a variety of new contexts. Topics include explorations of literary and cinematic traditions such as surrealism and film noir, situating Modiano's work among other literatures, the author's fascination with the dark years of the German Occupation, and his troubled relations with his parents.

This book takes a transnational and comparative approach that analyses the process of diffusion of a third way​ in selected transitions to authoritarianism in Europe and Latin America. When looking at the authoritarian wave of the 1930s, it is not difficult to see how some regimes appeared to offer an authoritarian third way somewhere between democracy and fascism. It is in this context that some Iberian dictatorships, such as those of Primo de Rivera in Spain, Salazar’s New State in Portugal and the short-lived Dollfuss regime in Austria are mentioned frequently. Especially during the 1930s, and in those parts of Europe under Axis control, these models were discussed and often adopted by several dictatorships. This book considers how and why these dictatorships on the periphery of Europe, especially Salazar’s New State in Portugal, inspired some of these regimes’ new political institutions particularly within Europe and Latin America. It pays special attention to how, as they proposed and pursued these authoritarian reforms, these domestic political actors also looked at these institutional models as suitable for their own countries. The volume is ideal for students and scholars of comparative fascism, authoritarian regimes, and European and Latin American modern history and politics.