Read complete books and articles on: French Fiction

French Literature - writings in medieval French dialects and standard modern French. Writings in Provençal and Breton are considered separately, as are works in French produced abroad (as at Canadian literature, French).

Medieval Literature

Until the 12th cent. a.d. most forms of writing in Gaul were in Latin. Old French emerged from the Latin vernacular of the south known as the langue

Medieval Literature

Until the 12th cent. a.d. most forms of writing in Gaul were in Latin. Old French emerged from the Latin vernacular of the south known as the langue d'oïl. Because of the French Crusades and military interests abroad (1050–1210), Old French became an international tongue, and a literature arose that reflected the attitudes and activities of the military, as in the Chanson de Roland (c.1100; see Roland). A tradition of epic poetry was developed by traveling minstrels, or jongleurs. Lengthy narratives were recited in groups of laisses, 10- to 12-syllable lines rhyming in groups of varied lengths (see chansons de geste).

Another early literary strain developed in the 12th cent. from the stories of saints and heroes and the Celtic romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Later, more refined romances and allegories include the philosophical Roman de la Rose and the witty Reynard the Fox.Marie de France and others created new forms, including the lai, animal fable, and fabliau (rhymed anecdotal piece). Many of these were based on themes from classical mythology. The works of Ovid and Aesop were especially popular sources, as was Arthurian legend.

French lyric poetry developed with the songs of the troubadours and the trouvères and from the more personal works of professional poets. Among the best-known lyric poets of the Middle Ages are Colin Muset, Rutebeuf, Christine de Pisan, Alain Chartier, Charles d' Orléans, and the outstanding poet of Old French, François Villon. The earliest French drama consisted of religious plays, the most familiar of which are the anonymous mystères (such as the Mystère d'Adam) of the 12th cent. The miracle plays of the 13th cent. include Jehan Bodel's Jeu de St. Nicolas (1200). By the end of the century secular and didactic pieces, many of them comedies and fantasies, were being performed by nonclerics. French prose literature began with the writings of the chroniclers and historians, among them Geoffroi de Villehardouin, Jean de Joinville, Jean Froissart, and Philippe de Comines, last of the major medieval historians.

Renaissance Literature

The late 15th and early 16th cent. saw the flowering of the Renaissance in France. Three giants of world literature—François Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne—towered over a host of brilliant but lesser figures in the 16th cent. Italian influence was strong in the poetry of Clément Marot and the dramas of Éstienne Jodelle and Robert Garnier. The poet Ronsard and the six poets known collectively as the Pléiade (see Pleiad) reacted against Italian influence to produce a body of French poetry to rival Italian achievement. The early 17th-century critic François de Malherbe attacked the excesses of the Pléiade; his zeal for the correct choice of words has marked French literature ever since.

The civil and religious strife of the later 16th cent. was reflected clearly in the works of the period, particularly in the poetry of Théodore d' Aubigné, Guillaume de Bartas, and Jean de Sponde. The greatest prose of the period was produced in the fiction of the ebullient Rabelais and in the magnificent essays of Montaigne. Under the stable and prosperous Bourbon monarchy Paris became the glittering cultural center of Western civilization.

Classicism: The Seventeenth Century

The 17th cent. produced the great academies and coteries of French literature. The elegant, controlled aesthetic of French classicism was the hallmark of the age: in the brilliant dramas of Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière; in the poetry and satire of Jean de La Fontaine and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux; in the prose of Blaise Pascal, Marie, marquise de Sévigné, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de La Fayette, and François, duc de La Rochefoucauld. The works of the ecclesiastic François de la Mothe Fénelon, the social philosopher Claude Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, and the satirist and classical scholar Jean de La Bruyère belong to this illustrious period as well as to the 18th cent.

These great writers vary enormously in their attitudes and interests but share a style that is lucid, polished, and restrained. They are, as a group, chiefly concerned with observing the subtleties of human behavior. Their works display qualities that have become permanently identified with the best French writing: wit, sophistication, imagination, and delight in debate.

From the mid-1680s French prose writers honed their critical facility as poetical and theatrical works waned in number and distinction. Ecclesiastical writing abounded and among the foremost figures in this field were Fénelon, Esprit Fléchier, Pasquier Quesnel, and Richard Simon. Major precursors of the Enlightenment of the 18th cent. were the philosophers Bernard de Fontenelle and Pierre Bayle.

Rationalism: The Eighteenth Century

The great French rationalists of the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason—François-Marie Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu—produced some of the most powerful and influential political and philosophical writing in Western history. The political and religious opinions expressed by the compilers of the Encyclopédie (completed 1765), led by Denis Diderot and the mathematician Jean d' Alembert, had great impact on French and foreign thought.

The period was also notable for advances in drama and fiction. Successful writers of tragic drama, other than Voltaire, include Antoine Houdar de La Motte and Buyrette de Belloy; the great writers of comedy were Pierre de Marivaux and Pierre de Beaumarchais. The French novel—Diderot and Marivaux contributed to its literary form—gained popularity with the works of Alain René Le Sage, Abbé Prevost, and Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and by the end of the century was among the foremost of literary genres. Another significant form of literature was the memoir; among the many writers of the period who excelled at this sort of autobiography were Mathieu Marais, Edmond Barbier, and Jean François Marmontel.

Romanticism, Realism, and Other Movements: The Nineteenth Century

The upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era were accompanied by new intellectual trends. Romanticism, greatly influenced by the philosophy of Rousseau, was heralded in the writings of Germaine de Staël and François René, vicomte de Chateaubriand. The principal figures of the Romantic period include Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred, comte de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, Gérard de Nerval, Prosper Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas, père, and Théophile Gautier.

The period that saw the transformation from romanticism to the realism of Gustave Flaubert was spanned by the writings of the great 19th-century novelists Stendhal, George Sand, and Honoré de Balzac. The romantics and realists alike wrote of the painful discovery of self-awareness and the torments of the inner life and, in differing degrees, concerned themselves with contemporary social mores. Hugo and Balzac both wrote much-imitated historical novels. Balzac's multivolume panoramic description of French society, entitled La Comédie humaine, stands as a unique literary monument to individual genius and a remarkable portrait of an era. The outstanding critic of the era was Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, whose literary essays were models of perceptive criticism.

In the later part of the century major writers of fiction included Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant, renowned for his short stories. The movement toward naturalism had its foremost French representative in the prolific novelist Émile Zola. The plays of Eugène Labiche, Émile Augier, the younger Alexandre Dumas, and later of Edmond Rostand won popularity in France and abroad. Major 19th-century French writers of history include Augustin Thierry, Jules Michelet, and François Guizot. Hippolyte Taine and Ferdinand Brunetière were outstanding critics, and Anatole France is considered the leading satirist of the age.

In poetry the Fleurs du mal (1857) of Charles Baudelaire had enormous influence, both at the time it was published and for many decades thereafter. In the later 19th cent. several circles, or schools, of literary figures became a prominent feature of Parisian letters: the Parnassians, led by Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle; the group around the Goncourt brothers; the symbolists, who were followers of Stéphane Mallarmé; and the decadents, who sought to glorify Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. The great poets of the age, including Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud, Péguy, and later Paul Valéry, worked for the most part outside such groups.

The Twentieth Century

The Novel

In the 20th cent., as in the 19th, the novel was the chief form of literary achievement. Although the impact on fiction writing of such factors as the vast changes in political climate, the new concentration on modern culture, the great wars, the development of major publishing houses, the introduction of the paperback, and the evolution of the movies has been very great, French writing has maintained a concern for moral questions, individual liberty and character, and, above all, respect for language and form.

The novelists Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, and Pierre Loti explore the psychological explanation of human behavior

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13 of the Best Books and Articles on: French Fiction

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction » Read Now
by Gerald Prince. 168 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

"Narrative as Theme is a brilliant critical performance, admirably lucid and rich in substance."-Ross Chambers, University of Michigan. "The questions raised by Prince's book are at the heart of contemorary critical thought: what do narratives tell the reader about the ways they construct themselves...
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"Narrative as Theme is a brilliant critical performance, admirably lucid and rich in substance."-Ross Chambers, University of Michigan. "The questions raised by Prince's book are at the heart of contemorary critical thought: what do narratives tell the reader about the ways they construct themselves as stories about a certain 'reality'? What do they tell us about their own truth-value and the techniques they use to convey it? What do they tell us about the hermeneutics of either telling or reading a story?"-Ora Avni, Yale University.In literature the very act of narration often constitutes a theme: everyone is familiar with narration that interrupts the story, that provides an ironic gloss on the action, that exposes the narrator, that serves to deceive. In Narrative as Theme Gerald Prince offers the first book-length study of the theme of narrative and of the relationship between narrative and truth in fiction.In the first part, theoretical in nature, Prince considers the notion of theme as well as the theme of narrative itself, surveys the research that has come out of that notion, and isolates starting points for the investigation of narrative as theme. Of particular interest to narratologists will be his discussion of the "disnarrated," all those passages of a text that consider what did not or does not happen but oculd have. He shows how the disnarrated is an important guide to reading the theme of narrative. The second part focuses on seven French novel: Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, Voltaire's Candide, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Sartre's La Nausée, Maupassant's Bel-Ami, Claude Simon's La Route des Flandres, and Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures. Written in first and third person, absorbed or not in the act of narration, variously concerned with history, ethics, and psychology, these classical, modern, and postmodern works exemplify basic positions with regard to the truth or value of narrative.His Dictionary of Narratology, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1987, confirmed Gerald Prince as one of the world's leading narratologists. He is a professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania.
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2.

The Contemporary Novel in France » Read Now
by William Thompson. 420 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
3.

The Art of French Fiction: Prevost, Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, Gide, Mauriac, Proust » Read Now
by Martin Turnell. 394 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

Style in the French Novel » Read Now
by Stephen Ullmann. 282 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
5.

Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel » Read Now
by Elena Russo. 225 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library

This book examines three first-person novels that narrate spectacular failures of self-representation. In an innovative move, the author grounds these failures in the narrators' inability to move beyond Empiricist notions of correspondence between private, nonverbal experience and public expression...
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This book examines three first-person novels that narrate spectacular failures of self-representation. In an innovative move, the author grounds these failures in the narrators' inability to move beyond Empiricist notions of correspondence between private, nonverbal experience and public expression, an inability that confines them to various forms of solipsism. Russo contends that such Empiricist notions still inform contemporary French novels and criticism. She deftly shows that current forms of linguistic skepticism favored by Blanchot, Sartre, Barthes, and Derrida are in fact the very product of the Empiricist notion of truth these authors claim to have rejected. Instead, she argues for the social and contextual dimension of language and against the illusion of authenticity on which these critics still rely. Her readings recast the debates surrounding postmodernism by placing them in a much-needed historical context. Through a series of lively close readings of Prevost's Histoire d'une Grecquemoderne, Constant's Adolphe, and Des Forets's Le Bavard, Russo establishes the continuous legacy of Empiricism across three centuries. Prevost pins his narrator's interpretive difficulties on an inability to know and categorize Oriental reality, Constant grounds his critique of language on the same ethical and political principles that underlie his liberalism, while Des Forets's extreme solipsism pitches him against the Sartrean notion of engagement.
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6.

Short French Fiction: Essays on the Short Story in France in the Twentieth Century » Read Now
by J. E. Flower. 184 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

The Novel in France: Mme de la Fayette, Laclos, Constant, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust » Read Now
by Martin Turnell. 432 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
8.

The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction, 1935-1960 » Read Now
by John Cruickshank. 262 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
9.

Of Words and the World: Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction » Read Now
by David R. Ellison. 196 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library

Here David Ellison explores the problems encountered by France's best experimental authors writing between 1956 and 1984, when faced with the question: What should my writing be about? These years are characterized by the rise of the new novelists, who questioned the representational function of...
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Here David Ellison explores the problems encountered by France's best experimental authors writing between 1956 and 1984, when faced with the question: What should my writing be about? These years are characterized by the rise of the new novelists, who questioned the representational function of writing as they created works of imagination that turned in upon themselves and away from exterior reality. It became fashionable at one point to affirm that literature was no longer about the world but uniquely about the words on a page, the signifying surface of the text. Ellison tests this assumption, showing that even in the most seemingly self-referential fictions the words point to the world from which they can never completely separate themselves. Through close readings Ellison examines the novels and theoretical writings of authors whose works are fundamental to our perception of contemporary French writing and thought: Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Duras, Sarraute, Blanchot, and Beckett. The result is a new understanding of the link between the referential function of literary language and the problematic of the ethics of fiction.
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10.

Dangerous Truths & Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569-1791 » Read Now
by Thomas Dipiero. 408 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
11.

Fiction Rivals Science: The French Novel from Balzac to Proust » Read Now
by Allen Thiher. 226 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going...
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In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going into the twentieth century, Proust. According to Thiher, each of these novelists considered himself to be in competition with science to make the novel an instrument for knowledge.
The first chapter sets forth the understanding of science that dominated the early nineteenth century in order to make it plausible that literary minds, throughout the nineteenth century, thought that they could not only rival science, but even make positive contributions to knowledge. The Newtonian paradigm that had dominated the Enlightenment was slowly being challenged by new developments both in physics and in nonphysical sciences such as biology. Especially in biology the development of a scientific discourse using narrative temporality favored the idea that novelists could also use fiction to construct discourses that advanced knowledge.
Balzac wanted to construct a natural history of society and correct the chemical theory of his time. Flaubert drew upon medicine and physiology for the rhetoric of his realist fiction. Zola used unsuccessful medical paradigms for his doctrine of heredity, and models drawn from thermodynamics to describe the relation of the individual to societal forces. Finally, Proust drew upon thinkers such as Poincare to elaborate an epistemology that put an end to the rivalry novelists might feel with scientists. Proust located certain knowledge within the realm of human subjectivitywhile granting the power of laws to rule over the contingent realm of physical reality, in which, after Poincare, neither mathematics nor Newton was any longer a source of absolute certainty. Proust's novel is thus the last
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12.

Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, 1896-1919 » Read Now
by Marcel Proust, Sylvia Townsend Warner. 416 pgs.

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13.

Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction ("Forged in Crisis: Queer Beginnings of Modern Masculinity in a Canonical French Novel" begins on p. 249) » Read Now
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 520 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Through discussions of a diverse array of British, French, and American novels, this collection of essays explores queer worlds of taste, texture, joy, and ennui, focusing on such subjects as flogging, wizardry, exorcism, dance, Zionist desire, and Internet sexuality.