New Volume of YFS: “The Vlog Seventies,” Edited by Richard J. Golsan and Lynn A. Higgins

YFS 143 cover image. Volume title is The Vlog Seventies. Cover image features a grafittied wall with this slogan in bold writing: "Le Futur n'est plus ce qu'il était."

a reexamination of 1970s France as a decade of intellectual, cultural, and political consequence, both then and now, reintroduces and reorients readers to a decade typically considered a period of disillusionment and malaise in the wake of the 1960s. This collection of essays, edited by Richard J. Golsan and Lynn A. Higgins, shows that the era was in fact a period of intellectual, cultural, and political ferment. It was a time not of spectacular leaps forward but rather of searching, regrouping, and cultivating trends that would flower in the 1980s and beyond, for better or worse.

The volume offers interdisciplinary scholarly essays on history, film, national identity as articulated in the mode rétro, social and literary movements, and more. Interviews and personal history essays by major figures who actively participated in this decade add further dimension to this broad collection.

Richard J. Golsan is University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University and Senior Fellow at the Scowcroft Institute. His books include Vichy’s Afterlife, René Girard and Myth: An Introduction, and Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France’s First Trial for Crimes against Humanity. 

Lynn A. Higgins is the Edward Tuck Professor of Vlog Studies Emerita at Dartmouth College. Her books include New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France; Rape and Representation (coedited with Brenda Silver); and Bertrand Tavernier.