A comprehensive exploration of Paris through the texts and experiences of a vast and vibrant range of authors.

For centuries Paris has had a deep association with the development of literary forms and cultural ideas. This Companion shows how Paris, in its various districts, has inspired writers from Moliere to Henry James, from Victor Hugo to Jean Rhys, and how it is now responding to multicultural diversity.

A fresh and comprehensive account of the literature of France, from medieval romances to twenty-first-century experimental poetry and novels.

This Companion offers readers an accessible survey of the historical and symbolic relationships between literature and the city.

Charles Baudelaire's place among the great poets of the Western world is undisputed, and his influence on the development of poetry since his lifetime has been enormous. In this Companion, essays by outstanding scholars illuminate Baudelaire's writing both for the lay reader and for specialists. In addition to a survey of his life and a study of his social context, the volume includes essays on his verse and prose, analyzing the extraordinary power and effectiveness of his language and style, his exploration of intoxicants like wine and opium, and his art and literary criticism. The volume also discusses the difficulties, successes and failures of translating his poetry and his continuing power to move his readers. Featuring a guide to further reading and a chronology, this Companion provides students and scholars of Baudelaire and of nineteenth-century French and European literature with a comprehensive and stimulating overview of this extraordinary poet.

No city more than Paris has had such a constant and deep association with the development of literary forms and cultural ideas. The idea of the city as a space of literary self-consciousness started to take hold in the sixteenth century. By 1620, where this volume begins, the first in a long line of extraordinary works of the human imagination, in which the city represented itself to itself, had begun to find form in print. This collection follows that process through to the present day. Beginning with the 'salon', followed by the hybrid culture of libertinage and the revolutionary hotbeds of working-class districts, it explores the continuities and changes between the pre-modern era and the nineteenth century, when Paris asserted itself as cultural capital of Europe. It goes on to explore how this vision of Paris as a key capital of modernity has shaped contemporary literature.

This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.