Published December 2001
All Puns Intended: The Verbal Creation of Jean-Pierre Brisset
Walter Redfern
Research Monographs in French Studies 9
- ‘Brisset had been a good soldier, and he was a model railwayman: there was no hint during the working day of the oddity of what he was up to after hours... The fact that frogs turned out to speak what was easily recognizable as French seems at no point to have fazed Brisset, and since the original human language has willy-nilly to be universal, all other known languages must be capable of being derived from French, which was pleasing news for a Frenchman.’ — John Sturrock, Times Literary Supplement 18 January, 2002, 41
- ‘What indeed can one make of this autodidact who mused about etymology without mastering Latin and about human origins without reading Darwin? Brisset can readily be dismissed as arrogant, Gallocentric, sex-obsessed or simply unreadable. Yet Redfern finds in his work a splendid proof of the instability of language, and also a fine pretext for learned digressions about puns and myths and free associations and what Ponge called 'amphibiguité'... The main pleasure given by this book actually comes from Redfern's own style, which is intelligent, energetic, quirky and never too self-indulgent.’ — Peter Low, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 24/2, 2003, 51-2
- ‘Walter Redfern ... a particulièrement raison de s'appuyer sur les travaux les plus sérieux de ces dernières années pour situer enfin la place de Brisset et l'impact de ses ouvrages parmi les créateurs littéraires de la fin du XIXe et de la première moitié du XXe siècle. ... Un bonne bibliographie sert d'appui à cette monographie intelligemment projetée.’ — Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France November 3, 2004, 732
- ‘Redfern's treatment is interesting and wide-ranging, but interesting because it is wide-ranging. He shows that Brisset has interested a lot of interesting people, then sums him up: 'Brisset is a trampoline: to take off from and to come back to.' I think he is half right: one may be glad that he existed to provoke this book.’ — Stephen F. Noreiko, French Studies 57.2, 2003, 255-56
Published December 2016
Southern Regional French: A Linguistic Analysis of Language and Dialect Contact
Damien Mooney
Research Monographs in French Studies 47
- ‘Encapsulates both the challenges and the promise of linguistics for history... the kinds of suggestive connections between linguistic form, social identity, and cultural context traced in chapter six hint at the considerable possibilities for integrating a substantive study of language into cultural history. It is to be hoped that more historians will take up this challenge.’ — Paul Cohen, H-France 18, February 2018, no. 5
- ‘Un travail de grande qualité et sera une référence incontournable pour tous les dialectologues, phonologues et sociolinguistes qui s’intéressent à la variation phonologique en français.’ — Julien Eychenne, French Studies 72.3, July 2018, 484-85