The international team of contributors and consultants have provided over 700 entries offering wide-ranging coverage and crossing the traditional boundaries between disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. French culture is defined in its broadest sense and areas covered include:
Economy
Education
Film
Food and Wine
Gender and Sexuality
Intellectual Life
Language and Identity
Literature
Media
Music
Performing Arts
Politics
Religion
Society
Visual Arts.
Entries range from shorter, factual contributions to longer overview essays, and provide an essential context for anyone studying French, readers with an interest in critical theory and anyone pursuing comparative studies in European culture. To assist readers with their research a classified contents list identifies relevant entries within a particular field. The articles are extensively cross-referenced to provide links between subjects and conclude with annotated suggestions for further reading.

More than 700 alphabetically organized entries by an international team of contributors provide a fascinating survey of French culture post 1945.
Entries include:
* advertising * Beur cinema * Coco Chanel * decolonization * écriture feminine * football * francophone press * gay activism * Seuil * youth culture
Entries range from short factual/biographical pieces to longer overview articles. All are extensively cross-referenced and longer entries are 'facts-fronted' so important information is clear at a glance. It includes a thematic contents list, extensive index and suggestions for further reading.
The Encyclopedia will provide hours of enjoyable browsing for all francophiles, and essential cultural context for students of French, Modern History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203003306

A cultural history of one of Paris's most fascinating and variegated areas, whose history can be summarized as 'from riches to rags and back again.' The Marais was the beating heart of fashionable Paris from the Middle Ages through to the time of Louis XIV, when the court's move to Versailles marked the start of a decline in its fortunes. Thereafter it became a working-class, largely Jewish area, sometimes described as a 'ghetto', and by the early twentieth century was in a parlous condition from which it was extricated by the Paris City Council and the 1960s restoration plan of Andre Malraux (which did not go without criticism and opposition). Its most recent avatar has been as the best-known gay quartier of the capital, though again this identity has not been a straightforward or always easily-accepted one. The stress throughout will be on representations - literary, cinematic, autobiographical, photographic and in graphic-novel form - as much as if not more than the unfolding of historical events.

Epicentre of the Revolution of 1789, erstwhile bastion of the skilled working-class and centre of radical agitation, along with Pigalle and Montmartre a focus for popular and raffish night-life in the early twentieth century, the Bastille area of Eastern Paris (also known as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine) is now an ethnically and socially mixed quartier which still bears the traces of its previous avatars. In a fascinating tour, Keith Reader charts the history and cultural geography of this unique area of Paris, from the fortress and prison that gave the area its name to the building of the largest and costliest opera house in the world.

A cultural history of one of Paris’s most fascinating and variegated areas, whose history can be summarized as ‘from riches to rags and back again.’ The Marais was the beating heart of fashionable Paris from the Middle Ages through to the time of Louis XIV, when the court’s move to Versailles marked the start of a decline in its fortunes. Thereafter it became a working-class, largely Jewish area, sometimes described as a ‘ghetto’, and by the early twentieth century was in a parlous condition from which it was extricated by the Paris City Council and the 1960s restoration plan of André Malraux (which did not go without criticism and opposition). Its most recent avatar has been as the best-known gay quartier of the capital, though again this identity has not been a straightforward or always easily-accepted one. The stress throughout will be on representations – literary, cinematic, autobiographical, photographic and in graphic-novel form – as much as if not more than the unfolding of historical events.

Of Jean Renoir's "La Regle du jeu" (1939), Richard Roud noted: "if France were destroyed tomorrow and nothing remained but this film, the whole country and its civilisation could be reconstructed from it.'" An extravagant claim, but one that in the view of Keith Reader is justified. In this original, up-to-date, scrupulously documented book on one of the great films of world cinema, Reader focuses on "La Regle du jeu "in the context of both the time in which it was made and the currents of intertextuality by which it is traversed. He examines sequences from the film itself, its themes, reception and critical approaches and readings. He also explores its extraordinary subversive charge and its dynamic effect on subsequent generations of filmmakers, including Alain Resnais and Robert Altman.

This is the essential companion to "La Regle du jeu," demonstrating as it does why this film remains so central to French cinema and to the history of French and indeed European culture.

The study of French cinema has expanded dramatically in recent years, as it is increasingly taught alongside literature in modern language departments. Many entrants to courses have no previous experience of film study. This book, written by two leading scholars of French film, offers students an introduction to the history and theory of French cinema, while giving them an understanding of the concepts and techniques involved in the study of film. It also contains a model essay, sample film analyses, and an appendix of statistics, filmography, bibliography and glossary, making this book an indispensable and comprehensive resource.

France's 'murder of the century' remains also the most violent non-war crime by women against women on record. The Papin sisters' killing and mutilation of their mistresses in 1933 has provoked reproduction and speculation ever since, by such prominent cultural figures as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Chabrol. This book offers an overview of these reproductions and draws some provocative conclusions from them.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the work of Robert Bresson, one of the most respected and acclaimed directors in the history of cinema. Bresson's unique use of "models" (he refuses the term "actors"), his sparse and elliptical editing style, his rejection of conventional psychological realism make his work all but unique and instantly recognizable. This is the first monograph on his work to appear in English for many years, and deals with his thirteen feature-length films and his short treatise "Notes on Cinematography."