Publisher's notice

Information about this book was provided by its publisher in 2011. The description given is not an independent review. All details are subject to change, especially pricing. Please use the contact links at the top of this page to notify any innacuracy.

---

Michelle R. Warren.
Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier's Middle Ages.
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press.
Publication date: December 2010 (US)/January 2011 (UK).
Size: 5.5"x8.5".
Page count: 416pp, 40 photos.

Publisher's recommended price
Hardback ISBN 9780816665259, $75.00
Paperback ISBN 9780816665266, $25.00

Description:

How a scholar's multilingual, multiracial background created a French medieval ideal

Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his time. A scholar of the French Middle Ages, he translated Tristan and Isolde as well as France’s national epic, The Song of Roland. Bédier was publicly committed to French hegemony, yet he hailed from a culture that belied this ideal - the island of Réunion in the southern Indian Ocean.

In Creole Medievalism, Michelle R. Warren demonstrates that Bédier's relationship to this multicultural and economically peripheral colony motivates his nationalism in complex ways. Simultaneously proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for the island, Bédier defends French sovereignty based on an ambivalent resistance to his creole culture. Warren shows that in the early twentieth century, influential intellectuals from Réunion helped define the new genre of the "colonial novel," adopting a pro-colonial spirit that shaped both medieval and Francophone studies.

Probing the work of a once famous but little understood cultural figure, Creole Medievalism illustrates how postcolonial France and Réunion continue to grapple with histories too varied to meet expectations of national unity.