Foreign Correspondence: News from France

194 FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE: NEWS FROM FRANCE By Pierre Coustillas (University of Lille) Late Victorian and Edwardian studies have been particularly active in French Universities in recent years, but most of the activities of French academics concerned with the ELT period are hardly noticeable from abroad. The reasons for this are not far to seek: criticism in French on English literature is all too often ignored outside Frenchspeaking countries; whatever is written and published is not properly advertised and distributed outside France, and French anglicistes constitute a world of their own, the contacts extant with scholars in English-speaking countries having been made on a personal basis. Here as in other fields exceptions prove the rule. It is tolerably well-known that there are, aside from the various Paris Universities, three Victorian (and Edwardian) groups in Montpellier, Lyons, and Lille, but it is essential to note that some useful coordination at the national level was attempted some years ago when the French Society of Victorian and Edwardian Studies was founded. The President of this Société Française des Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes is Professor Jean-Claude Amalric of the Université PaulVal éry in Montpellier, the author of an important study of George Bernard Shaw. This attempt at coordination has been markedly successful , with two meetings a year (one in a provincial university in May, the other in Paris in October), the publication of a newsletter entitled Bulletin de la SFEVE, and a yearly symposium usually held in January. The latest of these, devoted to "Divertissement et Divertissements ," took place in Paris on 30-31 January 1982. The I983 symposium is scheduled to take place in the University of Besançon. There have been in recent years a variety of publications in volumes and in serials. The most important of the serials has been the Montpellier Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, now issued twice a year and devoted alternately to a special author or subject and to miscellaneous articles on the (mainly late) Victorian and Edwardian eras. All the issues concerned are of ELT interest, but special mention must be made of Number 2 (1975), Studies in Joseph Conrad, Numbers k-5 (1977), Studies in E. M. Forster, Numbers 9-10 (1979)■Studies in Edwardian and Anglo-Irish Drama, Number 12 (I98O), Studies in Thomas Hardy. Fourteen numbers have appeared to date, and I983 will see the publication of a special number on Kipling. Number 13 is a catalogue of French doctoral theses in progress in the field of Victorian and Edwardian studies. On the whole, since this serial began in 19731 stress has been laid on the novel and on the drama. The University of Lyons has published a similar serial entitled Confluents, some numbers of which only have been devoted to Victorian studies which the University of Limoges, with a leading French Conradist in the English Department, François Lombard, has brought out an annual cahier entitled L'Epoque Conradienne for several years. A few State Doctoral theses defended recently are available either 195 from the Centre de Reproduction des Thèses de l'Université de Lille III or from some commercial publishers. Among the former are studies of Mrs. Humphry Ward, by Françoise Rives and of the early novels of Maugham by Joseph Dobrinsky, while among the latter should be noted two studies of Chesterton, La Vision du Monde chez G. K. Chesterton, by Christiane d'Haussy (Didier, I98I) and G. K^ Chesterton: Création Romanesque et Imagination, by Max Ribstein~TKlincksieck, I982). The Presses Universitaires de Lille have issued six volumes of ELT interest: Politics in Literature in the Nineteenth Century, edited by P. Coustillas, 191T^ (includes essays on Gissing and Mrs. Humphry Ward); Victorian Writers and the City, edited by J. P. Hulin and P. Coustillas, I978 (includes essays on Gissing, Arthur Morrison and Kipling); selected short stories by Hardy in translation, Nouvelles Choisies de Thomas Hardy, edited by P. Coustillas, I98O, and translated in collaboration with others: La Nouvelle Bohème (New Grub Street), 1978; Nouvelles Choisies de George Gissing, I98I, and Femmes en Trop (The Odd WomenT, I982. The well-known Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, published by Gallimard, have just issued Volume...