More than most books, collective volumes are the result of many people’s efforts. This one began life first in discussions among our close colleagues in the French section of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard, followed by a Radcliffe exploratory seminar that we organized with our colleague Abiola Irele in 2005. Funded by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the exploratory seminars bring together scholars in intense conversation over a two-day period. We are grateful to the Institute and its staff, in particular President Drew Faust (who was then the dean of the Radcliffe Institute) and Phyllis Strimling, for creating the context in which such happy brainstorming can take place. It was during that seminar, which was attended by a number of colleagues who would become contributors to our volume, that we decided on the importance of the global approach in writing French literary history.
The seminar was followed in December 2007 by a two-day conference at Harvard University: “Global France: A New Approach to French Literary History.” The conference, sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and organized by us, received generous funding from the Florence Gould Foundation in New York City, as well as from the Bacon Fund at Harvard. We thank all the members of the department staff who contributed to the conference, from sending out publicity to designing the striking poster. Our conference coordinator, Sara Kippur, who was writing her doctoral dissertation at the time, did an outstanding job organizing a complex schedule, and she went on to help us edit the book, taking on the demanding task of collating and preparing the bibliography. For her remarkable intelligence, organizational ability, and constant good cheer, we give her our heartfelt thanks.
In the later stages of preparing the manuscript, Kathryn Rose—also writing her dissertation—provided further valuable help. We thank her for her dedication and her careful attention to detail.
We were fortunate to have benefited from the late Christian Delacampagne’s early support of and enthusiastic participation in this project. Although his health prevented him from attending the conference, and his life was cut short before he could finish—as he had hoped—the essay he was writing for this volume, his thoughtful voice has remained with us throughout this project, and for that we are very grateful.
We thank our Harvard colleague, the distinguished medievalist Virginie Greene, who took time out from her numerous obligations to translate the quotes from medieval French texts in the essay by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet; the essay itself was ably translated by François Proulx, who was finishing her dissertation in our department.
Our editor at Columbia University Press, Jennifer Crewe, has supported and nurtured this project through many hurdles to its final form; she is not only a superb editor but also a true interlocutor. We owe her a great deal, and we gratefully acknowledge the debt.
We received valuable support for this volume from the Bacon and Murray Potter Funds of Harvard University.
The field of French studies has seen many exciting moments since the two of us were in graduate school: structuralism, deconstruction, the feminist revolution. We have been talking about them with each other for almost three decades, and for the past four years we have been talking about the “global.” We wish to thank each other for this extraordinary dialogue and collaboration. We were good friends when we began this project, and continue to be so—a fact for which we are grateful, and that speaks volumes.
Finally, we wish to thank our contributors for their lively and generous dialogue with us throughout the process, as well as their cooperative spirit in meeting deadlines and responding to our numerous requests and suggestions. We have learned a great deal from working with them, and we hope that readers will find their essays as rewarding as we have.
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