CONTENTS -- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS -- INTRODUCTION: THE LONG VIEW -- PART I. THE MIDDLE AGES: FROM THE EARLIEST TEXTS TO 1470 -- OVERVIEW OF THE PERIOD -- THE PERIOD IN CLOSE-UP -- The saints speak French -- Inventing love poetry: the songs of the troubadours -- The three matières and the move from history to fiction -- Courtliness and the rise of romance -- The chansons de geste -- Clerks, jongleurs, and townspeople -- Prose: history, romance, and the Grail -- Treatises, encyclopedias, and compilation in the thirteenth century -- The Roman de la rose and the allegorical tradition -- From the grand chant courtois to the formes fixes: the French lyric at its height -- The dit amoureux: between lyric and history -- Writing history -- Humanism, didacticism, licence and death -- The 'Querelle du Roman de la rose' and 'La belle dame sans mercy' -- Theatre in the late Middle Ages -- The future of a poet with a past: François Villon -- PART II. THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD: 1470-1789 -- OVERVIEW OF THE PERIOD -- THE PERIOD IN CLOSE-UP -- From Burgundy to the French court: Jean Lemaire de Belges -- Rabelais: Pantagruel and Gargantua -- Religious controversy and literature: the circle of Marguerite de Navarre -- Rabelais's later works -- Poetry: (i) from Marot to Labé -- Poetry: (ii) the Pléiade -- The late sixteenth century: Montaigne's Essais -- New directions in the early seventeenth century -- Poetry: (iii) Malherbe and his contemporaries -- Questions of language and style -- Theatre: a retrospect -- Theatre: Corneille and his times -- Descartes and Pascal: the mid-century turn -- Literature and power in the age of Louis XIV -- Questions of psychology and ethics -- Lucidity and uncertainty -- 'Ancients' and 'Moderns' -- Outlines of the novel -- The end of a reign: literature at the turn of the century -- The letter-form: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Graffigny.

The philosophes in action: the Encyclopédie -- Rousseau: autobiography and fiction -- The sentimental and the erotic -- Diderot: the philosophe and his double -- Crossing the divide -- PART III. THE MODERN PERIOD: 1789-2000 -- OVERVIEW OF THE PERIOD -- THE PERIOD IN CLOSE-UP -- Literature and political action -- The Romantic individual -- Literature and sexuality -- The Napoleonic legend -- Romanticism in verse -- History and prophecy -- Prose fiction prepares for victory -- Stendhal and Balzac -- A colossus: Victor Hugo -- Poetry and society -- Writing by women, 1830-1880 -- Theatre in the nineteenth century -- Literature before the law -- Flaubert's war on stupidity -- Literature and science: the case of 'Naturalism' -- Dreyfus and after -- Gide and Proust -- Literature and war: 1914-18 -- In Mallarmé's shadow -- Dada and surrealism -- Prose fiction between the wars -- The twentieth century's Voltaire: Jean-Paul Sartre -- Literature and war: 1939-45 -- The fortunes of the modern novel -- Writing by women in the twentieth century: a long revolution -- Theatre in the twentieth century -- Poetry in the later twentieth century -- Beyond the Hexagon -- Beyond the literary profession -- The Revolution remembered -- A final note, in which the story does not end -- POSTFACE -- SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING -- SOURCES OF QUOTATIONS -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.