Insights
George Sand’s novels treat love as a force that can transform a person’s entire moral and social existence. Passion matters, but it is never isolated from…
The French essay has never been a fixed literary container. It can be intimate or argumentative, philosophical or anecdotal, scholarly or deliberately…
Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal remains one of the defining books of modern poetry. First published in 1857 and expanded in later editions, the…
Marie Bashkirtseff’s diary is one of the most candid records of a young person trying to turn life into art. Written largely in French and published after her…
Jules Verne is often reduced to a small collection of spectacular journeys: a submarine beneath the oceans, a balloon crossing Africa, a race around the world,…
Molière remains one of the defining voices of European comedy because his plays turn familiar social behavior into theatrical conflict. A proud father, a…
Jules Michelet remains one of the most distinctive voices in nineteenth-century French history. His account of the Revolution is neither a neutral chronology…
Stéphane Mallarmé is one of the most influential and difficult poets in French literature. His poems often seem elusive because they do not present a story in…
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is often treated as a landmark of nineteenth-century fiction, yet its importance goes beyond the story of a dissatisfied…
Letters create an unusual kind of intimacy in fiction. A character writes when separated from someone they love, fear, deceive, or wish to persuade, and the…