Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity (2000) and Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (2005). He has co-edited Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (2003) and, with Andy Stafford, The Modern Essay in French: Movement, Instability, Performance (2005).
Andy Stafford is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Roland Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth: An Intellectual Biography (1998) and translated and co-edited a collection of Roland Barthes's writings on fashion, The Language of Fashion (2006). He co-edited, with Charles Forsdick, the volume The Modern Essay in French: Movement, Instability, Performance (2005).

Contents: David Steel : Une revue méconnue : Paul Desjardins et sa Civilisation Française - Alexandre Gefen : La Revue Blanche : modèle et anti-modèle revuiste au seuil du XXème siècle - Soheila Esmaïli : La Nouvelle Revue Française et le Surréalisme de 1924 à 1940 - Virginie Lupo : Les Temps modernes : scène privée, scène publique - Stamatina Dimakopoulou: Surrealism and the American Grain in VVV, 1942-1944: Culture, Theory, Art - Andy Stafford : 'Dynamite explosée dans les arcanes pourris des vieux humanismes' : A Literature of Politics or a Politics of Literature? Souffles, 1966-1972 - Katy Hindson/Charles Forsdick: France, Europe, the World: Gulliver, or the Journal as Vehicle of Literary Transformation - Patrick Suter : Poétique Surréaliste de l'anti-journal - Michael G. Kelly: Rhetoric and Metaphysics of the Avant-garde Community: Le Grand Jeu, 1928-1930 - Jean-Sébastien Lemieux : La modernité de IIIme Convoi : Rimbaud et Michaux convoqués par Jean Maquet - Robert Furlong : L'Essor, 1919-1959, et la production littéraire mauricienne - Joan Tumblety : Je suis partout, 1930-1944 - Pascal Mercier : Heurs et malheurs d'une 'revue de jeunes' : Confluences, 1941-1947 - Meadow Dibble-Dieng: When the Medium was the Message: Editorial Practice in the First Series of Présence Africaine - Marc André Brouillette : Ancrages et perceptions de la revue québécoise Liberté - Debra Kelly: Pierre Albert-Birot and SIC: The Avant-garde Review as Collective Adventure and Personal Poetics - Roxane Jubert : La revue Lettrisme : vaste indicateur du mouvement isouien - Charlotte Garson : Nomadisme saisonnier et écriture critique : notes sur le rôle des festivals pour les Cahiers du cinéma - Emma Wagstaff : 'Ce qui demeure': L'Éphémère and André du Bouchet.

The journal, periodical or revue has a long and largely unexplored history. The periodical has been recognized as a site of unexpected juxtapositions and unorthodox exchanges, a source of chance discoveries. It provides a unique insight into the uneven interactions that characterize any contemporary moment and is an invaluable archive in its own right. This volume aims, through a series of focused case studies, to explore the twentieth-century periodical publication in French, offering an overview of some of its most important manifestations and providing a general reflection on this complex textual form.