The most comprehensive history of literature written in French ever produced in English.

Introduction; 1. Manuscripts and manuscript culture; 2. The troubadours: the Occitan model; 3. The Chansons de geste; 4. Saints' lives, violence and community; 5. Myth and the matière de Bretagne; 6. Sexuality, shame and the genesis of romance; 7. Medieval lyric: the trouvères; 8. The grail; 9. Women authors of the Middle Ages; 10. Crusades and identity; 11. Rhetoric and historiography: Villehardouin's 'La Conquête de Constantinople'; 12. Humour and the obscene; 13. Travel and orientalism; 14. Allegory and interpretation; 15. History and fiction: the narrativity and historiography of the Matter of Troy; 16. Mysticism; 17. Prose romance; 18. Rhetoric and theatre; 19. The rise of metafiction in the late Middle Ages; 20. What does Renaissance mean?; 21. Sixteenth-century religious writing; 22. Sixteenth-century poetry; 23. Sixteenth-century theatre; 24. Women writers in the sixteenth century; 25. Sixteenth-century prose narrative; 26. Sixteenth-century thought; 27. Sixteenth-century travel writing; 28. Sixteenth-century margins; 29. Tragedy: early- to mid-seventeenth century; 30. Tragedy: mid- to late-seventeenth century; 31. Seventeenth-century comedy; 32. Seventeenth-century poetry; 33. Seventeenth-century philosophy; 34. Seventeenth-century women writers; 35. Moraliste writing in the seventeenth century; 36. Seventeenth-century prose narrative; 37. Seventeenth-century religious writing; 38. Seventeenth-century margins; 39. What is Enlightenment?; 40. The eighteenth-century novel; 41. The eighteenth-century conte; 42. Eighteenth-century comic theatre; 43. Eighteenth-century theatrical tragedy; 44. Eighteenth-century women writers; 45. Eighteenth-century philosophy; 46. Libertinage; 47. Eighteenth-century travel; 48. Eighteenth-century margins; 49. The Roman personnel; 50. Romanticism: arts, literature and history; 51. Realism; 52. French poetry 1793-1863; 53. Symbolism; 54. Madness and writing; 55. Literature and the city in the nineteenth century; 56. Nineteenth-century travel writing; 57. Philosophy and ideology in nineteenth-century France; 58. Naturalism; 59. Impressionism: art, literature and history (1870-1914); 60. Decadence; 61. Avant-garde: text and image; 62. Autobiography; 63. The modern French novel; 64. The contemporary French novel; 65. Existentialism; 66. Modern French thought; 67. French drama in the twentieth century; 68. Twentieth-century poetry; 69. Francophone writing; 70. Writing and postcolonial theory; 71. Travel writing 1914-2010; 72. French cinema 1895-2010; 73. Writing, memory and history; 74. Holocaust writing and film; 75. Women writers, artists and filmmakers; 76. Popular culture and the case of the bande dessinée; 77. Literature, film and new media; Bibliography; Index.