To start answering Dave Postle's request, I can recommend a work of
literary criticism on Shakespeare produced by a French scholar, Francois
Laroque, translated for Cambridge UP in the early nineties: *Shakespeare's
Festive World*. Laroque first published this book in French as *Shakespeare
et la fete, essai d'archeologie du spectacle dans l'Angleterre
elisabethaine* (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988). The
originality of his approach was to apply the methods of the 'mentalites'
school of historiography to the study of festive and carnivalesque
structures in Shakespeare's plays. He also uses the work of specialists of
European ethnology, like Claude Gaignebet, who did a similar study of
Rabelais (*A plus haut sens*, very different from Lucien Febvre or Mikhail
Bakhtine's works on the same author). Laroque's main ethnological (or even
anthropological) focus is the social experience of time and of the
calendars (pagan, Christian, solar, lunar) in England. I thoroughly
recommend the book, even to historians, as it shows the influence of the
best French historical and philosophical scholarship (like Delumeau or
Foucault) on literary research, and introduces very interesting new
insights.
Yours
Luc
**********************TIME TRIETH TRUTH********************
Luc Borot <lb@alor.univ-montp3.fr> home 33-67 52 07 98
<lb@bred.univ-montp3.fr> fax 33-67 14 24 65
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Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise
Universite Paul Valery --- Montpellier (France)