More importantly, the work presented demonstrates a lively diversity of methodologies: Murielle Lucie Clément combines a highly technical narratological approach and a post-colonial framework in her analysis of Dominique Bona’s novel Le Manuscrit de Port-Ebène; Beth Anne Gordon illuminates the ‘jubilant expression of anarchic energy’ of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu cycle by reference to the author’s passion for sciences, particularly the Darwinian ideas of human evolution and regression; Dominique Jeannerod conjoins sociology, history and literary analysis in an exploration of how the crime writer Didier Daeninckx’s literary project ties in with continuing French preoccupations with identity questions and the murky residues of France’s recent history. This spirit of hybridity also infuses the opening essay in the collection, Ross Chambers’s reflection on Rimbaud’s poem ‘Au Cabaret-Vert, cinq heures du soir’. In proposing an explanation of how this apparently ‘every day life’ poem fits into Rimbaud’s astonishing trajectory as a poet, Chambers performs a wonderfully engaging and masterly turn of his own. Open in his admiration of Rimbaud’s ‘limitless readability’, he deploys the lexicon of classical rhetoric and his own linguistic flair, elegantly melding erudition with sophisticated cultural exploration.

AJFS is a scholarly enterprise, and it does not need to apologise for its responsibility to keep its readership informed of things that are new and interesting in the field. Some might worry about the attention given to patently non-canonical authors and texts, such as Jean Duffy’s essay on the less-than-central novelist Pierre Bergounioux, but penetrating writing on so-called marginal or minor authors can help give definition to a field of which the parameters are anything but axiomatic. This is particularly evident in the second 2007 number, which carries the title ‘Embodying Words and Images’. Apart from Michèle Royer’s study of the films of Laurent Cantet and Agnès Varda, and guest editor Françoise Grauby’s analysis of the work of Hervé Guibert, there is little in the volume that even approaches the canonical. It is nonetheless absorbing in its fulfilment of one of the journal’s key editorial goals, namely the consideration of recent theoretical developments.

French scholarship has no monopoly over mapping the importance of the physical body in cultural production, but French thinkers such as Bataille, Barthes and Foucault have played important roles, and the body has become in recent years a prominent topic of investigation. As it happens, Ross Chambers has been a leader in that field, and his piece on Rimbaud would not have been out of place in the ‘Embodying Words and Images’ volume. After all, Rimbaud was more aware than most of how potently social and cultural forces impinge on the senses and (mis)shape the meaning that the individual makes out of the world. In fact, the number begins with a broad-brush anthropology of the senses by David Le Breton. Its title, ‘Des sens au sens’, plays on the linguistic ambiguity in the use of ‘sense/faculty of perception’ and ‘sense/meaning’, but there is nothing ludic in the radical materialism of the argument, which claims that it is only through the senses that humanity – individuals and cultures – constructs meaningful existence. Whether or not one accepts this, it makes for a bracing introduction to the volume, and one that leaves no doubt about the validity of the body as an object of study.

Once again, materials and approaches are stimulatingly diverse. Gilles Bonnet offers a cultural history of the impact of English pantomime on French theatrical culture in the second half of the nineteenth century, tracking how the robust and chaotic muscularity from across the Channel was welcomed as a force of renewal. Grauby’s analysis of Hervé Guibert’s confrontational self-portrayals during his illness with AIDS compares his carefully managed exhibitionism with extreme performance art such as that practised by Orlan or Gina Pane. Murray Pratt studies a six-volume bande dessinée – David B.’s chronicle of his brother’s struggle with epilepsy, L’Ascension du haut mal – as a way of reflecting on blurred borders between biography and autobiography, and on the tensions between the verbal and the visual; and he interprets the story within the context of the history of male psychology and identity in postwar France. Greg Hainge uses the typology of concrete music as a prism for examining the notoriously difficult fictional films of Philippe Grandrieux.

AJFS has an established position as an international forum for high-calibre intellectual discussion and as one of the foremost journals in its field. The quality of scholarship and writing in the two numbers under review confirm this distinction, and the vigour of the field itself.