French Global marks a unique and innovative approach to the history of "French" literary studies. It is the great merit and originality of this volume to propose an open, cross-cultural narrative of the heterogeneity that has always been a part of French literary production. This book is a welcome reference tool that offers students of French a useful guide to an alternative reading of French literature and literary history. -- Mitchell Greenberg, Goldwin Smith Professor of Romance Studies, Cornell University In a fascinating chronological series of mental voyages beyond the usual territorial boundaries, this comprehensive and rich compendium represents the beginning of the end--or perhaps the end--of 'national' literature, while retaining the specificity of a language of expression and helping us rethink the usual paradigms of French literature 'from the outside in,' as if 'Francophonie' had always existed. -- Philip Stewart, Duke University In our era of comparatism, world literature and 'litterature-monde,' cosmopolitanism, and universalism and migration, the idea of a national literature may well be obsolete. Yet this is not exactly what readers of French Global will find. Read together, these rewarding essays present a more fraught relation between the global and the national, or the local, and a more complex history leading to an accent on 'worlding' and cultural interconnections. Paradoxically, perhaps, they adumbrate a multifaceted series of specifically French conceptions of the global. -- Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University ...a powerful and persuasive revision of the monumental and monolithic idea of French literature, redefined as a multifaceted process fraught with differences and contradictions and bearing the stamp of transnational movements. -- Oana Panaite French Studies French Global is an invaluable text for students and scholars of French-speaking literatures and cultures. -- Arcana Albright H-France an innovative work first and foremost for reintroducing literary history as an approach to reading texts. -- Maria Lupas European Legacy