Recent Publications from Our Faculty Members

Pernette du Guillet: Complete Poems, A Bilingual Edition
EDITED BY KAREN SIMROTH JAMES& TRANSLATED BY MARTA RIJN FINCH
Published by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria College in the University of Toronto, 2010
http://www.crrs.ca/publications/bookseries/ov.htm

In 1545, the first edition of the Rymes presented the young Pernette du Guillet (long identified as muse and pupil of Maurice Scève in Lyon’’s lively literary circle) as a model of feminine virtue and learning for ladies to emulate. Such views have profoundly shaped the reading of her work, yet the poems reveal complex responses to lyric traditions and theories of love that transformed conventions and influenced many Renaissance writers. With her unique voice, du Guillet moved beyond the silence imposed on sixteenth-century women: expressing admiration and jealousy, awe and dismay, solemnity and playfulness, confusion and confidence, her poems evoke a young woman’’s experience with love and her own birth as a writer. This first complete English edition provides a fully annotated bilingual text and a fresh perspective from which to appreciate her poetry.

 

In Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France, Alison Levine argues that, between World Wars I and II, documentary film made a substantial contribution to the rewriting of the French national narrative to include rural France and the colonies. The book mines a significant body of virtually unknown films and manuscript documents for their insight into revisions of French national identity in the aftermath of the Great War. Examining documentary films about rural and colonial France side by side, Levine tells the histories of films and film programs that were largely funded by the French state. She analyzes the intentions behind these films and programs, their content, and their reception by the urban, rural, and colonial audiences they targeted. The book teases out their contributions, both practical and symbolic, to a new officially-encouraged understanding of France and its relationship to traditional societies, both in provincial France and in the colonies, during the interwar years.