Volume 37, Number 1 · February 1, 1990
From Abailard to Les Zutistes
By Robert M. Adams
A New History of French Literature
edited by Denis Hollier
Harvard University Press, 1,150 pp., $49.95
The Oxford Companion to French Literature
by Sir Paul Harvey, by J.E. Heseltine
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 771 pp., $49.95
The new mode in history seems to be upon us. Hard on the heels of Columbia's vast Literary History of the United States comes Harvard's New History of French Literature, both weighing in at over a thousand pages, and distinctively new and different in the number of authors employed as well as in their deployment. The New French History has 164 different contributors, writing, as I calculate, 202 different units—they are not big enough to be called 'chapters' and they are not numbered, even in the table of contents. Like its American predecessor, the French history arranges its units in chronological order, but it does not attempt to 'cover' a particular author in an individual unit, and rather glories in the freedom of having several different units to handle different aspects of the same author.
Review, 4474 words
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