This collection of essays addresses the question of lucidity as a thematic in literature and film but also as a quality of both expression and insight in literary criticism and critical thought more generally.

1 Lucidity and Tact 2 ‘A propos, ou hors de propos, il n’importe’: Relevance Theory and Montaigne 3 Lucidity and Misrecognition in Late Corneille 4 Flaubert: Lucidity, Mysticism, and the Senses 5 Lucidity, Modernity: Mallarme, Morisot, and Zola 6 Easy Reading: Zola’s Kitsch 7 The Fog of War: Impressionism and Zola Revisited 8 Baudelaire, Bonnefoy, Jeanne Duval: Poetry and Ethical Lucidity 9 The Peculiar Lucidities of Verse Form: Translation as an Operation of Consciousness 10 Marcel Proust, On and Off 11 Seeing Clearly into the Past: Sartre and Beauvoir at War 12 Nathalie Sarraute’s Domestic Spaces: Windows, Walls, and Blinding Lucidity 13 ‘Et la raison vacilla’: Sociality as Burden in Tahar Djaout and Mohammed Dib 14 ‘The open sea but not the wilderness’: Light and Clarity in the Late Work of Colette and Agnes Varda 15 Varda’s Hermitage: The Madonna del parto and La Pointe Courte