The key concept for understanding Swift's satire is not a rhetorical precept about persona, but a deeply held principle about what it means, in Swift's view, to be a person. For Swift, language, religion, and politics are not strictly divisible, but are all inextricably linked as integral parts of human endeavor. The serious business of Swiftian satire is that it invites (or provokes) the reader to be critical: that is, to judge. Most often, the judgments that Swift's satires ask us to make go well beyond straightforward condemnation of the work's obvious target; rather, we are led to form a series of deeper judgments about language, religion, and politics, and about the operations of human vice and virtue that govern these activities in others and in ourselves. The comic exuberance and imaginative plentitude that often characterize Swift's satirical writings should not blind us to the fact that Swift, though never moralistic, is a relentlessly moral writer. Even when being self-denigrating about its aesthetic qualities, Swift himself is adamant about the purpose of his work: “I have been only a Man of Rhimes, and that upon Trifles,” he writes, “yet never any without a moral View” (C iv: 52). This “moral view” pervading Swift's writings in both poetry and prose is not about adherence to a set of pious ordinances, but is deeply concerned with how people act as linguistic, religious, and political beings.

Dictionaries define the noun intellectuel as a person devoted by profession or taste to the exercise of intelligence, to the life of the mind. Yet the word - in both French and English - has a more specific meaning that, while widely recognised, almost never makes it into these definitions: that of a person of recognised intellectual attainments who speaks out in the public arena, generally in ways that call established society or dominant ideologies to account in the name of principle or on behalf of the oppressed.

This more pointed definition of the intellectual must be given pride of place in a chapter such as this one, which obviously cannot begin to cover all the French-language intellectual contributions of the twentieth century, or attempt a synthesis of philosophic, scientific, linguistic, literary, aesthetic, sociological and anthropological thought. At the same time, the porous boundaries between the different definitions of the intellectual make it impossible to remain solely within this canonical perspective. At times philosophic, literary or scholarly work by itself has sufficient impact to give its authors a role in public life. Perhaps more disconcertingly, the public intervention of the intellectual on behalf of a cause has become a stereotypic act that can seemingly be performed (or mimicked, purists would say) by individuals who lack the imprimatur of their peers as legitimate contributors to the life of the mind: entertainers, celebrities or essayists not esteemed within the intellectual community.

The period from about 1900 until the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) is often considered a second Renaissance in Spanish culture, a “Silver Age,” as José Carlos Mainer calls it. The novel of this period was particularly precocious, showing early signs of the artistic innovations that came to be called modernism in other European literatures. From 1870 onwards the novel had come into its own as a major cultural form in Spain for its ability to mirror a bourgeois society anxious to read portraits of itself. By the turn of the century, however, a growing intelligentsia was losing patience with middle-class values and their political and artistic manifestations. The Restoration government, which replaced the revolutionary initiatives of 1868-74, had created a peace and stability that Spain had not enjoyed during most of the earlier nineteenth century; at the same time, intellectuals were disgusted with its corrupt politics and support of conservative Spanish institutions such as the church hierarchy and the landed aristocracy. Modern philosophy and ideologies gave the intellectuals and writers the impetus they needed to seek new social and cultural forms.

“¡Adentro!” (“Turn inward”) exhorted Miguel de Unamuno in 1900,arguing for a reorientation of the collective psyche away from the material,scientific, technological aspects of life to the internal and spiritual.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a deep sense of disillusionment and exhaustion had settled over Spain. While the perception of decay and lost opportunities was generally felt throughout Europe, in Spain the circumstances were particularly striking. Despite a century of enormous progress and changes, the Old World was ill at ease with itself, a feeling of crisis at hand. Somewhat belatedly, Spain, too, had participated in the economic and social advances of the period, but always with the awareness of having once been an empire. Indeed, by 1898 the loss of empire was almost total after the disastrous war with the United States in Cuba. The sense of having come undone nationally, however, coexisted paradoxically with another feeling: the growing suspicion that the nation had never really coalesced ideologically or historically. Both regionalistic and political differences became more pronounced at the same time, as elsewhere secularization signaled a crisis of spiritual and moral values. On a personal level, Unamuno expressed Spanish isolationism thus: “Every soul lives alone among other souls alone, in a naked, sterile desert, where they twist and turn like the poor spirits of skeletons shut inside their anemic skins.”

The role of the State

The most original feature of French media is perhaps to be found in the role of the State which to a large extent has shaped the current situation of the broadcasting media and plays a supporting role in the survival of national papers with strong political commitments but devoid of sufficient advertising resources.

Media broadcasting emerged in France as the result of the initiative of wireless set manufacturers (Radiola) or of publishing groups (Le Petit Parisien). The government lost no time in asserting the State's monopoly over 'the sending and the receiving of radio-electrical signals of all kinds' (1923 Finance Bill) on the basis of the scarcity of national radio frequencies considered as a national asset. This restrictive approach to a new medium, enshrined in an article of the Finance Bill of 1923, was in fact the logical continuation of the traditional official position defined as early as 1837 which restricted the use of telegraphic signals to the suppliers licensed by the government.

In 1923, however, the law allowed the government to grant licences to private radio broadcasters under the control of the Ministry for Post, Telegraph and Telephone (PTT). Radio-Paris was in fact the only private radio station licensed by the administration, later to be relaunched by the State under the title of Poste National. By 1929, broadcasting was taken away from the supervision of the PTT Ministry to be put under the sole control of an Information Commissar directly responsible to the Cabinet (Council of Ministers).

For the intellectual historian of nineteenth-century Europe, certain words flag critical foci of interest: “revolution,”“evolution,” “nation,” “travel,” “industrialism.” These words are no less important in the literature of the period, and in Spain they have a particular relationship with the regional novel. Of these words, “evolution,” habitually associated with the ideas of Darwin, will be central to the discussion in this chapter. Common usage has accustomed us to apply it retrospectively and rather indiscriminately to areas of nineteenth-century life which, in their day, were innocent of such concepts. Yet the term “evolution” itself is one that has evolved. Coined by Haller in 1744, it initially indicated “preformationism,” the gradual unfolding of a form of life already perfectly formed. In the course of the nineteenth century, “evolution” came to have the force of “transmutation” with which we associate it today. Thus the shift was one from a consoling thought to achallenging one, from a position that maintained that change was, as it were,always and already foreseen, to the idea of evolution as a much more disturbingand challenging perspective, signaling that a change effected mightbecome something new. The evolving concept of the term “evolution” thusmoves from the idea of change as part of a pre-existing master plan (evolutionas development) to the idea of change as a process lacking linear certainty(evolution as variation).

As a commentator on the politics and social relations of his age it would have been hard for Jonathan Swift to ignore economic circumstances. The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a commercial revolution in the British Isles, transforming patterns of trade - both foreign and domestic, raising living standards, and permeating human relationships with commercial values. On its heels came the financial revolution associated with the European wars of the 1690s, with the emergence of an embryonic stock market, and the growth of new forms of credit both public and private, developments which would culminate a quarter of a century later with the world's first stock market boom and crash in the South Sea Bubble and Mississippi Company debacle of 1720. The financial innovations to which the Wars of Grand Alliance gave birth led to the establishment of new forms of wealth and a class of financial interests, known as the “moneyed men,” who challenged the hitherto established predominance of the landed gentry and aristocracy. These developments transformed the world of politics, creating opportunities - sometimes rather questionable ones - for enrichment for wider circles than the financiers themselves and bringing into existence forms of wealth that were not merely intangible but to many people barely comprehensible. Amongst those drawn into such activities were leading ministers and military commanders. In the later stages of theWar of Spanish Succession even the Duke of Marlborough, England's greatest general since the Hundred Years War, came to be seen as putting self-enrichment through war before the interests of his country, corruption for which he was memorably satirized by Swift, along with his inordinate political ambition, in The Conduct of the Allies in 1711.

Philosophy and kabbalah were highly variegated programs for the interpretation of rabbinic Judaism. Although kabbalah was rooted in the esoteric traditions of late antiquity, it became a self-conscious program for the interpretation of Judaism at the end of the twelfth century, to counter Maimonidean intellectualism. Nonetheless, kabbalists addressed the theoretical issues of concern to the rationalist philosophers and theorized within the conceptual framework of contemporary philosophy. In the second half of the thirteenth century, two types of kabbalah were consolidated: theosophic kabbalah mythologized philosophical categories while articulating a comprehensive alternative to rationalist philosophy. Prophetic (or ecstatic) kabbalah, by contrast, developed a full-fledged intellectual mysticism on the basis of Maimonides' theory of knowledge and gave kabbalistic doctrines a philosophical reading. During the fourteenth century a few Jewish philosophers, especially those who cultivated the study of astrology and astral magic, viewed kabbalah and philosophy as compatible schemas that give different names to the same entities. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the philosophic reading of kabbalah was prevalent in Italy where kabbalah was viewed by Jews, and even by some Christian humanists, as ancient speculative lore necessary for intellectual perfection. In Spain and in the Spanish diaspora the mythical aspects of kabbalah were more prominent. While some kabbalists had a very negative view of philosophy, the dominant attitude toward kabbalah among Iberian philosophers was quite positive. They considered that kabbalah revealed knowledge that completes and perfects human reason and went on to recast medieval Aristotelianism in accord with the teachings of kabbalah.

The number of books and articles about Swift is extensive. The works listed below only begin to suggest the sheer range of writing on Swift. This list can be updated and supplemented by consulting the works listed in the bibliographical section below and by browsing such online search engines as MLAIB, The MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures and ABELL, the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Printed journals such as The Scriblerian and Swift Studies also contain helpful listings of recent work.

Sometime during the 1960s, the mirror breaks for Spanish narrative. Such works as Luis Martín Santos's Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence, 1962), Juan Goytisolo's Señas de identidad (Marks of Identity, 1966), Miguel Delibes's Cinco horas con Mario ('Five Hours with Mario', 1966), José María Guelbenzu's El mercurio ('Mercury', 1968), Camilo José Cela's Vísperas, festividad y octava de San Camilo del año 1936 en Madrid (San Camilo in 1936: The Eve, Feast, and Octave of St. Camillus of the Year 1936 in Madrid, 1969) and, most radically, Juan Benet's Volverás a Región (Return to Region, 1967) wreak havoc on the reality, idea, and ideal of realism. To different degrees, and from often considerably different ideological positions, each of these works twists, blurs, stretches, smashes, or scoffs at mimetic representation, communicability, and referentiality. Language, turned into its own object, becomes opaque, restive, polyvalent, and at times even purposeless. The trend is solidified in the early 1970s with the publication of Goytisolo’s Reivindicación del conde don Julián (Count Julián, 1970), Benet’s Una meditación (A Meditation, 1970) and Un viaje de invierno (‘A Winter’s Journey’, 1972), Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s La saga/fuga de J. B. (‘The Saga/Fugue of J. B.’, 1972), Juan Marsé’s Si te dicen que caí (The Fallen, 1973), Luis Goytisolo’s Recuento (‘Recount’, 1973), and Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra (Juan the Landless, 1975).

When we look back at Spanish modern literary historiography it soon becomes evident that Spain's literary corpus as a whole was often and overly conceptualized as “different” in relation to the Western European canon. Inversely, when reviewing Spain's current literary critique on Spanish postmodern production – that is, from 1975 onwards – it is also strikingly evident that what is usually expressed is its “normalcy.”

Spain’s formerly assigned non-modern literary “difference” as well as its current post-modern “normalcy” cannot be understood as an isolated cultural phenomenon but, rather, as part of a broader constellation. Although profoundly cultural, the process-formation of “Spanish difference” or “Spanish normalcy,” as conceptual designators for the non-modern and the post-modern respectively, widely surpasseses the literary. It ultimately relates to Spain’s intervention vis à vis the history of capital development – Spain’s initial and increasing estrangement from modernity starting with the shift in imperial economic power in the late seventeenth century from the Spanish via the Netherlands to the English and ultimately, to Anglo-America, and its final plunge into the new contemporary post-modern world economy after 1975.

Introduction

In 1948, the philosopher and rising star of Parisian existentialism, Jean- Paul Sartre, recast a series of essays into book form as Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (What is Literature?) The question Sartre raised in the title introduced a set of concerns he deemed central to the programme of committed writing (litte rature engagée) he and his colleagues sought to implement through the literary monthly, Les Temps modernes, they had launched in October 1945. Sartre's postwar ambitions for philosophy and literature were pragmatic and activist. Above all, he sought to mobilise the writer into an historical agent, a 'bad conscience' who spoke out in public - as often in speech as in writing - on the social and political issues of the moment. But while Qu'est-ce que la littérature? was a manifesto for littérature engagée, Sartre also saw the need to ground his programme in terms that addressed the nature of literature and of literary activity: what literature was, so to speak, aswell as what he wanted it to do. It was, then, no small irony that much as Sartre sought to mobilise the writer of prose within a broad public sphere represented by mass media such as the daily press, theatre, film, the foundational questions he addressed in the opening chapters of Qu'est-ce que la litté rature? - what is writing? why write? for whom does one write? - drew openly on a philosophical tradition whose origins in Greek antiquity included Aristotle's Poetics and Plato's Republic.

In 1989 France celebrated the Bicentennial of the Revolution which overthrew the ancien régime and established the First Republic. Culminating in a spectacular display on the Place de la Concorde on 14 July, the celebrations were an affirmation of France's revolutionary origins and its republican tradition, a tradition which, through the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, were eclipsed by Bonapartism but which, with the hiatus of the Occupation, had run uninterrupted from 1871. The events in Paris on 14 July 1989 were important as a statement about France's political and social identity at the end of the twentieth century, but they also adopted a cultural format of extreme theatricality in which high cultural and popular cultural traditions merged: the evening's climax consisted of the American soprano Jessye Norman singing the Marseillaise whilst circling the obelisk at the centre of the Placede la Concorde entwined in a huge tricolore flag. Not for the first time did France choose to celebrate its historical origins with a cultural event of high theatricality which also adopted the format of the carnival. At the same time, the Bicentennial celebrations were by no means the result of spontaneous or piecemeal enthusiasm. On the contrary, they were the culmination of years of planning at the highest levels of the State, overseen and orchestrated by the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang. As such, they were confirmation of the central role of the State in the operation of late twentieth-century, as early twentieth-century, France, and of the importance it accords to culture as a means of affirming national identity.

Introduction: towards a definition

The object of study that is both configured and analysed in this chapter is usually split into four categories: French literature (written in France), 'Francophone' or 'non-Hexagonal' productions (written in French outside of hexagon-shaped France) and within each field, a further separation occurs between canonical and popular literature. Because critical studies are often restricted to high culture, and have long treated France as the unquestioned centre of French studies, Francophone countries and popular literature are the vulnerable variables of the equation. In this chapter, we propose to redraw the disciplinary borders that have surrounded traditional fields ('popular culture', 'Francophone' and 'French' literatures) and focus on narrative fiction of French expression.

We do not pretend that France can arbitrarily be treated as just one Francophone area among others or that the distinction between high culture and low culture can be instantly abolished. The Hexagon has always had specific characteristics, notably a self-perception as the centre and point of origin. Even if we keep in mind regional cultures (Occitany, Brittany), France is a monolingual country whereas all other nations mentioned in this chapter will have French as one of their languages. In formerly colonised areas (North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean) French has been associated with conquest and cultural domination. In yet other countries, French is a vulnerable cultural capital threatened by other expanding linguistic forces (English in Quebec for example).

This chapter is concerned with two aspects of Don Quijote and the picaresque: how the novels were intended and received in their historical context, and what posterity made of them. Though modern criticism has tended to treat the Quijote and the picaresque novel as virtually opposed fictional worlds, they are much more closely related. Indeed, in some ways, Don Quijote grows out of Alemán's picaresque classic Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). Thus we should consider first the picaresque before Cervantes.

The genre was born in 1554 with the publication of the anonymousLazarillo de Tormes. Five years later, Lazarillo was blacklisted on the firstSpanish Index because of its irreverence towards the church, but was allowedto recirculate in expurgated form from 1573. The Inquisition’s disapprovalchecked the development of the picaresque for the next forty years; but thisgenre, and comic/satiric writing in general, revived spectacularly with thepublication in 1599 of the first part of Alemán’s novel and its wildfire editorialsuccess. A spate of robustly comic fiction followed in the immediate wakeof Guzmán de Alfarache, including Don Quijote, Part I (1605), togetherwith several picaresque sequels or successors to Guzmán, like Quevedo’s ElBuscón (written about 1605).