Three members of staff from the Department of French have just had an edited collection published by Palgrave Macmillan. Questions of Influence in Modern French Literature is edited by Dr Thomas Baldwin, Dr James Fowler and Dr Ana de Medeiros.
The collection asks broad-ranging questions. What is meant by ‘influence’ in the realm of literature, art, music or ideas? How is it related to concepts such as pastiche or parody? Self-evidently, our understanding of any ‘past’ work depends on contemporary methods of reading; but does it makes sense, therefore, to claim that influence can be retroactive? Harold Bloom used the term ‘the anxiety of influence’ as the title of a famous study, but his is only one of many theorizations that span the modern era. The collected essays examines a variety of texts written in French from the eighteenth century onwards, together with a number of visual and musical works.
For more details of the book, please see the publisher’s website here:
www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=659311