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Rating: 
Summary: Ok, but not excellent
Review: I'm an upper level French student, and this was the anthology used in one of my classes. I've found that there's a wide variety of authors, although from what I understand, this was not true of past editions which excluded women writers. More importantly, there's a variety of genres, including plays and poetry as well as the typical novels. Sadly, in some cases the works showcased are not necessarily the authors' most important works, which bothers me a bit. There's certain texts that you think would be necessary for students of French literature to read that are sadly absent. This may simply be because I'm judging the popularity of texts from an American perspective while in France they have very different ideas of what's necessary. . .The thing that bothered me the most, however, was that this is intended for survey classes and touches on each author and work only very briefly. This is not so much a problem with the poetry as with the novels and plays. I wasn't able to develop an interest for any of these works because there are only excerpts. The rest of the novel is, more often than not, summed up in less than three sentences. The excerpts are fine for pointing outthe stylistic details of the writing, but it doesn't allow the student to invest in the characters or the plot. In other French lit survey classes I've taken, the professor did require us to read a few complete novels or chose short stories and novellas, rather than excerpts from books. I found that to be more effective and did a better job of inspiring me to look up other works by those authors. On a final note, it seems that some of the footnotes are inaccurate or reflect unpopular interpretations. Many times my professor instructed us to disregard Leggewie's comments. For instance, Leggewie claims Rene by Chateaubriand is autobiographical, when most critics think Cb intended it as fiction. Tread carefully.
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