Our Introduction traces the biography of John Cleland, the notorious and hitherto elusive eighteenth-century author, as we now see it through the letters and documents published in this volume. We follow his early career in Bombay, climbing the ranks of the East India Company, his prison writing of and subsequent re-arrest for Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, his volatile relationship with his mother, his disappointment in writing for the stage, his patronage by the Delaval family, and – new to Cleland scholarship – his intriguing friendship with Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and the French spy Thomas Pichon, which reveals new attributions to Cleland and his attempted assimilation amongst a literary Francophone community as ‘Jean de Cleland’.

My hypothesis is that the beginning of the twenty-first century marked the emergence of a ’therapeutic’ way of writing and reading. Literature is viewed as a way of bringing literature and medicine closer together and extending a more general view on literary forms of attention and the ethics of care. With the example of French and Francophone literature, I suggest a relational turn defines the contemporary literature: literature is considered as a relationship – between the author and herself, between the author and her relatives, between the author and her readers, and between the readers themselves. Literature is a means of producing awareness and attention, that is to say, to point out, to make visible, to give importance to people or to situations that society and the economy do not make visible or invisible.

Looking at French writer Édouard Louis’s oeuvre – including En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy) (2014), Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father) (2018), Changer: Méthode (Change: Method) (2021), Combat et Métamorphoses d’une femme (Battles and Metamorphoses of a Woman) (2021), and Dialogue sur l’art et la politique (Dialogue on Art and Politics) (2021) – this chapter analyses the relationship between (white) working-class/poor individuals and medicine, masculinity and care. This study sheds light on Louis’s strategy to deploy a ’democracy of care’ – that is, a type of social organization grounded in equality, more horizontal relations, and which values care (and care workers) over economic production – by using his artistic practice to draw attention to lived experiences of trauma, pain, silence, and social invisibilization. Further, it does not only appear that Louis’s writing about pain serves to reflect on France’s healthcare policies and inequalities, but also that power dynamics (such as patient-doctor) inform his writing practice.

Sergei Kibalnik explores how Chekhov conducted polemics with major French writers of the nineteenth century and how he overcame his status as the “Russian Maupassant,” ultimately rejecting the latter’s absurd view of life in favor of a more homegrown redemptive moral strategy grounded in the possibility of inward transformation.

This essay looks at the intertextual presence of French literature in Bolaño’s writings, which are famously global in their intersecting plots and cosmopolitan characters. With a focus on the contemporary urban experience, Bolaño elevates the Baudelairean flâneur motif to a global scale, and inherits the Surrealist topos of the city as a place of chance encounters. The quest for a missing or forgotten writer, a structuring device used over and over in Bolaño’s fictions, can be traced back to Surrealist aesthetics, and it also provides a serviceable image of a quest for the validation of narrative. We look at what Bolaño’s novels, in which“visceral realism” defeats the grand 19th-century principle of the well-constructed plot in favor of a loose stringing together of episodic lives, owe to the tradition of Marcel Schwob’s imaginary lives, to Georges Perec’s aesthetics of the collection, the list, and the “infra-ordinary,” and to more contemporary poets of documentary everydayness and small lives such as Pierre Michon and François Bon.

Russian novels are in intense, ambivalent dialogue with the European tradition; Tolstoy’s take up the British and the French in particular. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reminds us that adultery is an ever-present threat in the British family novel, as it is in the novel of sensation. Like Tolstoy, Mrs. Henry Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon contrast the dynamics of different marriages. They also set adultery in the context of a system that works against women. In Wood’s East Lynne, Carlyle not only forgives his dying ex-wife, but declines to indict her former lover for murder; as he says, “I leave him to a higher retribution: to One who says ‘Vengeance is mine.’” This quote becomes Tolstoy’s epigraph.

Although best known as a clear-eyed, realist poet of vivid, precise description, Elizabeth Bishop was powerfully drawn to surrealism, the avant-garde movement devoted to the unconscious, the irrational, and the power of dreams. This apparent contradiction is just one of the many paradoxes that make Bishop’s work and life so fascinating, but it is also one of the most significant and generative. This chapter argues that Bishop’s interest in surrealism is not merely a youthful enthusiasm that she definitively leaves behind. Surrealism struck a deep chord within her and remained a significant element of her poetic toolkit from beginning to end. Bishop’s poems are also not just influenced by surrealism, but in some ways are about it, thematically. She carries on a lifelong debate with surrealism and its implications, composing poems that probe fraught tensions between the unconscious and the conscious mind, between dream and waking, freedom and control.

Chapter 26 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, England, and the United States, examining figures such as Cicely Hamilton, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley/Edith Cooper), Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney,Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Samuel-Auguste André David Tissot, Sapphism, Honoré Daumier, Pierre Lou?s, Henry Thornton Wharton, and Emily Dickinson.

How does God speak? In late seventeenth-century France, the sacred model of the fiat lux (‘Let there be light’, Gen. 1:3) proposed by Longinus and familiar from Boileau’s 1674 translation was an important point of reference. Theologians defined the divine voice in terms of its transcendent efficacy, and although they rarely addressed current musical practice, they employed images derived from biblical sources to give it concrete form. This chapter builds on our existing knowledge of how the growing vogue for the sublime intersected with religious discourses and explores the ways in which influential preachers portrayed the ability of sound to wrench listeners from themselves and exalt in their devotions. It contrasts the sonic characteristics of the voice of God in the Old Testament (astonishingly thunderous) with the choir of angels in the Book of Revelation and Jesus’s pleading voice in the Gospels. By concentrating on sound in this manner, theological reflections articulated different facets of the sublime – from a mystical invitation to harmony, to a pastoral theology of shock.