Each essay consists of three segments: background material on the author (including biographical detail); a critical appraisal of the works themselves – their impact on the society of their time, and/or on the evolution of literary forms; and the elucidation of an illustrative textual extract, most often translated by Nelson himself. (Nelson won the 2015 NSW Premier's Award for his distinguished renderings of Zola. His translations in this volume – particularly those of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Proust, and Céline – are a tour de force.) The essays are supported by generous indications of critical writing in English on each author and of existing translations of their works. In this way, the Introduction doubles as a practical reference tool for the Anglophone student and general readership that it targets.

The book shows a clear predilection for the novel, both as literary form and as a mode of socio-political engagement. Beginning with the pioneering La princesse de Clèves (Madame de La Fayette, 1678), Nelson traces over the course of the work a quite comprehensive history of the French novel, exploring how the genre evolves in complexity and orientation over time. His analyses of the big four of the nineteenth century are excellent: Balzac's ambitious realist project to represent the totality of the human condition; Stendhal's preoccupation with the psychology of the individual subject in post-Napoleonic society; Flaubert's progressively more concentrated attempts to refine writing to pure style; Zola's commitment to crafting work that could encompass the new realities of scientific discovery and the emergence of a mass society. Coverage of the transformative novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is also compelling: Proust's Search for Lost Time; Céline's Journey to the End of the Night; Sartre's Nausea; Camus's The Outsider; the work of the nouveaux romanciers, and that of Queneau, Perec, Duras, Echenoz, Houellebecq. The absence of Gide's The Counterfeiters and Malraux's La condition humaine from this list is odd, and Nelson is on slippery ground when he relegates female novelists to a short section entitled 'Duras and other women writers', although he does, in addition, note the importance of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Marie NDiaye in evoking the recent phenomena of 'autofiction' and 'francophone' writing.

'This is easily the most ambitious project that Cambridge University Press has to date undertaken in its ''introductions'' series'

Emphasis on the novel does not mean that he ignores poetry or theatre: there are stimulating essays for example on La Fontaine and Molière, on Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Beckett. But one does not get the sustained sense of an unbroken tradition that we have with the novel. In poetry, key sixteenth-century poets are missing (Ronsard, Du Bellay, Louise Labé), as are the prominent Romantics Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Musset; and there is nothing after Apollinaire in the twentieth century: no Claudel, Valéry, Saint John Perse, Francis Ponge, Yves Bonnefoy. Similarly, in relation to the theatre, while the studies of Jarry and Beckett are illuminating in themselves, they do not give much idea of the richness of French theatrical writing and production from, say, the Théâtre Libre in the late nineteenth century, through the Théâtre National Populaire to the more contemporary, and internationally influential work of Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine: no Giraudoux or Anouilh, and only passing reference to Ionesco and Genet.

An 1840 portrait of Stendhal by Olof Johan Södermark (Palace of Versailles via Wikimedia Commons)

Humanist-rationalist writers who use formal innovation to promote intellectual and social freedom and to subvert the dominant religious and political authorities and orthodoxies constitute one of the great strands of French literature. Nelson is at his most fluent and persuasive on such topics, as illustrated in his essays on Montaigne, Rabelais, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, and Sartre. The stresses on artistic experimentation and class struggle, conjoined to a lucidly articulated history of ideas, give the book its spine and coherence. I would argue, however, that too little attention is devoted to showing just how crucial the roles of Church and State have been, both within the literary tradition, and in France's projection of itself, at least since Louis XIV, as an expansive cultural power. In Nelson's work, they sometimes appear as two-dimensional forces of authority against which his chosen writers must and do rebel; but we must not forget that the same civilisation that produced and gave patronage to these writers also built cathedrals, and generated great theologians and a multitude of saints every bit as subversive of the given order as any literary figure. Readers unaware of this dimension, whose literary representatives include Pascal, Chateaubriand, Bloy, Claudel, and Mauriac, may not grasp the full weight of the achievements and courage of those –­ including avowed Catholics and other believers – who have written against injustice and obscurantism.

'He takes his readers on a bold and informative tour of some of the brightest stars in the French literature galaxy'

The Introduction contains a few historical inaccuracies: the royalist Action Française league was not in any meaningful way 'neo-Fascist', for instance, and nor was Georges Bernanos ever left-wing, or a member of any 'International Brigade' in Spain. As a Catholic committed initially to Franco's cause, Bernanos did famously change his mind in Les grands cimetières sous la lune (1938): not in order to support the Republican side, but to denounce the brutality and hypocrisy of Franco and his Church supporters.

Such reservations notwithstanding, the book remains an important contribution and a rewarding read. Nelson writes crisply and insightfully. His scholarship, for the most part, is all the more impressive for being deftly deployed and mercifully free of the jargon that encumbers too much academic writing today. He has successfully made his own the motto of the French classical period – plaire et instruire (to impart pleasure and knowledge) – and in doing so, offers a new generation of readers a timely and thought-provoking pathway into French literary art.