Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

In June 2006 delegates from eight countries representing six French, US, and British-based learned societies met at St Catherine's College, Oxford, for a conference on the French long seventeenth century entitled 'Modernites/Modernities'. Nineteen of the best papers on theatre, fiction and poetry were selected for this volume, and they present new perspectives on novels as different as L'Astree and Le Roman bourgeois, comedy and tragedy, actors' practices, the ballet de cour and the burgeoning genre of opera, and a time span from Du Bellay to Mme de Gomez. The cardinal feature of this wide range of topics lies in the unifying factor of vibrant modernity.

Much work has been done in recent years on Quinault's librettos, but no major study of his spoken plays has appeared since the monumental thesis by Etienne Gros, published in 1926. Moreover, he has never been the subject of a monograph in English. There is a need to re-assess the influence of his life on his plays, and to re-evaluate Gros's findings in the light of eighty years' research into seventeenth-century French theatre in general. This book rejects the deterministic approach that sees his plays as apprentice pieces for the greater achievement that is his corpus of librettos, as well as the implicit comparative approach that pigeon-holes his work, in passing, by borrowing from the pithy judgements of Boileau. To what extent does Quinault's steady move away from comedy and light tragi-comedy to tragedies that combine love and menace go hand in hand with his search for greater integrity, better characterisation, and ever more credible plotting? How did he come to create and retain a tremendously faithful audience that even the withering mockery of Boileau failed to discourage? And is there any purpose in retaining the time-worn comparison between the author of Andromaque and the author of Astrate?

In June 2006 delegates from eight countries representing six French, US, and British-based learned societies met at St Catherine's College, Oxford, for a conference on the French long seventeenth century entitled 'Modernites/Modernities'. Twenty of the best papers on religion, ethics and history were selected for this volume, and they present new perspectives on topics as diverse as devotion and pornography, artifice and the pursuit of truth, Bruscambille and Pascal, historiography from the sixteenth century to Voltaire, and, of course, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.

Sales Techniques is an insightful and practical compilation of proven techniques and modern tools, designed to help both neophyte and seasoned sales professionals work with customers and successfully close the deal.

From selling solutions instead of products to finding, communicating with, and even closing customers on the Internet, this latest addition to the popular Briefcase Books series will show salespeople how to organize their sales efforts, work successfully with todays more demanding customer base, efficiently and effectively close a sale, consistently follow up after the sale to encourage high-profit repeat business and referrals, and much more.

While browsing a Stonington, Maine, bookstore, Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams discovered a rare copy of an exquisite autobiography by nineteenth-century British nature writer Richard Jefferies, who develops his understanding of a "soul-life" while wandering the wild countryside of Wiltshire, England. Brooke and Terry, like John Fowles, Henry Miller, and Rachel Carson before, were inspired by the prescient words of this visionary writer, who describes ineffable feelings of being at one with nature. In an introduction and essays set alongside Jefferies' writing, the Williams share their personal pilgrimage to Wiltshire to understand this man of "cosmic consciousness" and how their exploration of Jefferies deepened their own relationship while illuminating dilemmas of modernity, the intrinsic need for wildness, and what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of fourteen books including "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place" and "When Women Were Birds." Recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, she teaches at Dartmouth and the University of Utah where she is the Annie Clark Tanner scholar in the environmental humanities graduate program. Her work has been anthologized and translated worldwide.

Brooke Williams has spent thirty years advocating for wildness, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and as executive director of the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming. He is the author of four books including "Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness," and dozens of articles. Brooke and Terry have been married since 1975. They live with their dogs in Jackson, Wyoming, and Castle Valley, Utah.
Praise for Terry Tempest Williams' "When Women Were Birds"
"Williams displays a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions...As the pages accumulate, her voice grows in majesty and power until it become a full-fledged aria." --"San Francisco Chronicle"
Praise for Brooke Williams' "Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness"
..".a compact yet breathtaking treatise." --"Publishers Weekly"

This collection of twenty essays, of which five are in French, written by leading English and French literary and historical scholars, deconstructs the ethical and political framework supporting and circumscribing the actions of a powerful elite in France between the early 1600s and the final years of Louis XIV's reign. Reflecting a diversity of individual concerns, the essays are divided into two interrelated parts in acknowledgement of the complex tensions between codes of behaviour and political practice in the different theatrical spaces of government in the real and imaginary world. Together these contributions offer a radical double questioning of the absolute values in which were founded the authority of Church, King and nobility. The dual political and moral theme of this study is not new, but it is one that has always been highly regarded by historians and literary specialists alike. It is in fact one of the classic preoccupations of seventeenth-century studies, to which critics must always return, and to which students must always address themselves, if they are to comprehend the intellectual core of seventeenth-century French studies.