It will help you a lot if you use the summer vacation to do some initial preliminary reading for the module. The following books are advised (the first two are essential, the third one is optional). There is only one other e-book (price £5.49) that you will need to purchase for this module, though this one is not suited for preliminary reading. If you are buying French ebooks with Amazon or Apple, and your account is based in the UK, you should search for them on the UK version of their stores (you will not be able to purchase them, for example, on Amazon.fr due to rights issues). As noted below, versions of items 1 and 2 below are also available through the library as free ebooks, though you may prefer the practicality of the purchased versions.

1. Joseph Nye, The Future of Power, PublicAffairs, 2011, available as a kindle ebook or as an ibook for £5.99. (Note this is also available as a free ebook through the university library, but you can only download the file on a temporary basis, and you may prefer to purchase your own ebook for purposes of highlighting, notes etc). This is not a book about France, but is an accessible introduction to general questions of power in international relations by the inventor of the concept of 'soft power' (one of the book's virtues is its critical conception of the tangled relations of 'soft power' with other forms of power).

2. Philippe Lane, Présence française dans le monde. L'action culturelle et scientifique, La Documentation française, 2016 available as kindle ebook for £8.37. This short book gives a summary overview of the contemporary range of French instruments for cultural projection and the exerting of influence. We will examine these critically and in greater depth across the module itself, but it will help if you have a sense of the big picture before we start. Note that an English translation, based on an earlier edition, is available as a free ebook through the library, with the title French Scientific and Cultural Diplomacy (2013). The 'Cambridge' version of this library ebook is probably the most practical, though you have to download the chapters as separate pdfs. Finally, you may find chapter 7 rather technical - do not worry if the budgetary details are a bit confusing.

3. [OPTIONAL]. François Chaubet and Laurent Martin, Histoire des relations culturelles dans le monde contemporain, Armand Colin, 2011 (available as kindle ebook through Amazon.co.uk or as ibook through Apple ibook store, both for £23.99). This is definitely more stretching in some places, but gives a very rich account of the long-term position of France in relation to wider global cultural dynamics, as well as various theories for understanding those dynamics. I would advise beginning with the introduction, moving on then to chapters 4, 5, and 7, and possibly then on to chapters 8, 9 and 10.