The heritage of literature in the French language is rich, varied, and extensive in time and space; appealing both to its immediate public, readers of French, and also to a global audience reached through translations and film adaptations. The first great works of this repertory were written in the twelfth century in northern France, and now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, include authors writing in many parts of the world, ranging from the Caribbean to Western Africa. F...

Few periods in history are so fundamentally contradictory as the Baroque, the culture flourishing from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in Europe. When we hear the term âBaroque,â the first images that come to mind are symmetrically designed gardens in French chateaux, scenic fountains in Italian squares, and the vibrant rhythms of a harpsichord. Behind this commitment to rule, harmony, and rigid structure, however, the Baroque also embodies a deep fascination wit...

In this short but succinct book, the Author explains the profound but simple way to achieve happiness and what he now enjoys “invincibility”. There have been many self-help books written and published, however many cover the same old topics like motivation, gratitude etc, and sadly many are only just quick fixes. What you will learn in this book is how we all have learned to practise the art of Learned Un- Happiness and how to dump it, in an honest no nonsense way. John is not and experien...

People have been writing literary works in French for a thousand years, since the eleventh century. What began as a small stream of texts copied by hand has become a vast river of printed poems, dramas, novels, stories, biographies, and autobiographies in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of forms created and enjoyed now not only in Europe but on many continents. French was long the true lingua franca of cultural elites in many countries. Yet, French has also been a language of revolutionary a...

In the Renaissance and early modern periods, there were lively controversies over why things happen. Central to these debates was the troubling idea that things could simply happen by chance. In France, a major terrain of this intellectual debate, the chance hypothesis engaged writers coming from many different horizons: the ancient philosophies of Epicurus, the Stoa, and Aristotle, the renewed reading of the Bible in the wake of the Reformation, a fresh emphasis on direct, empirical obser...

This is a book about how Molière, France's most celebrated author of comedies, made something strikingly new out of the traditional comedy plot of thwarted courtship. Though justly celebrated for his mastery of physical comedy and farce, one of Molière's key moves was to pay attention to the way women could use language. Seventeenth-century France was a time when speaking well became exceptionally important, and in this arena women were the trend-setters. Among the most important places ...

In this authoritative and accessible account of French literature, sixteen essays by leading specialists offer provocative insights into French literary culture, its genres, movements, themes, and historic turning points, including the cultural and linguistic challenges of today's multi-ethnic France. The French have, over the centuries, invented and reinvented writing, from the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes to Montaigne's Essays, which gave the world a new literary form and a n...

Wetlands are, by their very nature, ephemeral and transitional, which makes them challenging to characterize. Yet the need for characterizing wetlands continues to grow, particularly as we develop a better understanding of the wealth of ecosystem services that they provide. This book provides practical tools and methods to help practitioners more effectively locate, identify, and map the extent of wetlands, and therefore better understand the importance of wetlands to society and the large...

The late Professor Reds Wolman in his Foreword to the award-winning second edition said, "This is not your ordinary textbook. Environmental Hydrology is indeed a textbook, but five elements often found separately combine here in one text to make it different. It is eclectic, practical, in places a handbook, a guide to fieldwork, engagingly personal

In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the de...

The fifteen articles in this volume highlight the richness, diversity, and experimental nature of French and Francophone drama before the advent of what would become known as neoclassical French theater of the seventeenth century. In essays ranging from conventional stage plays (tragedies, comedies, pastoral, and mystery plays) to court ballets, royal entrances, and meta- and para-theatrical writings of the period from 1485 to 1640, French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, ...

A riveting account of courageous resistance from the bestselling author of Balcony Over JerusalemLonglisted for the 2025 Walkley AwardShortlisted for Best Non Fiction in the Indie Book Awards 2026On 24 February 2022, residents of Kyiv, Ukraine, woke to the sound of explosions and gunfire as Russian forces attempted to seize Hostomel Airport. It marked the beginning of the first land war in Europe since Worl...