French literature - Romanticism, Poetry, Novels

French literature

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Middle Ages
- The origins of the French language
- The context and nature of French medieval literature
- The chansons de geste
- The romance
- Lyric poetry to the 13th century
- Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
- Allegory
- Lyric poetry in the 14th century
- Villon and his contemporaries
- Prose literature
- Religious drama
- Secular drama
The 16th century
- Language and learning in 16th-century Europe
- The elevation of the French language
- Major authors and influences
  - Poetry
  - Prose
The 17th century
- Literature and society
  - Refinement of the French language
  - The development of drama
  - The heroic ideal
  - The honnête homme
  - Racine’s fatalism
  - Nondramatic verse
- The Classical manner
  - Religious authors
  - Satire
  - The Ancients and the Moderns
The 18th century to the Revolution of 1789
- The Enlightenment
- Drama
  - Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
  - Marivaux and Beaumarchais
  - Bourgeois drama
- Poetry
- The novel
  - Rousseau
  - Laclos and others
From 1789 to the mid-19th century
- Revolution and empire
  - The poetry of Chénier
  - Revolutionary oratory and polemic
  - Chateaubriand
  - Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
  - Romanticism
  - Foreign influences
  - The poetry of the Romantics
    - Lamartine
    - The early poetry of Hugo
    - Vigny
    - Musset
    - Nerval
  - Romantic theatre
    - Hugo
    - Vigny
    - Musset
- The novel from Constant to Balzac
  - The historical novel
  - Stendhal
  - Sand
  - Nodier, Mérimée, and the conte
  - Balzac
- 19th-century thought
  - Literary criticism and journalism
  - Historical writing
  - The intellectual climate before 1848
  - Renan, Taine, and positivism
From 1850 to 1900
- New directions in poetry
  - Gautier and l’art pour l’art
  - Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
  - Baudelaire
- Realism in the novel
  - Diversity among the Realists
  - Flaubert
- Drama
- Naturalism
  - Zola
  - Maupassant
- The reaction against reason
  - The Decadents
  - The Symbolists
- The novel later in the century
From 1900 to 1940
- The legacy of the 19th century
  - Gide
  - Proust and Claudel
  - Valéry
- The impact of World War I
  - War novels and poetry
  - The avant-garde
  - Colette
- Political commitment
- Politics in the novel
  - Céline and Drieu
  - Malraux, Gide, and others
  - Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
- Poetry
- Theatre
- The eve of World War II
The mid-20th century
- The German Occupation and postwar France
  - Sartre
  - Camus
  - Beauvoir
- Toward the nouveau roman
- Theatrical experiments
- Postwar poetry
- The 1960s: before the watershed
  - Structuralism
  - Lacan and Foucault
  - La Nouvelle Critique (French New Criticism)
Approaching the 21st century
- The events of 1968 and their aftermath
  - Derrida and other theorists
  - Feminist writers
- Other literature of the 1970s
  - Historical fiction
  - Biography and related arts
  - Detective fiction
- The 1980s and ’90s
  - Fiction and nonfiction
    - Postcolonial literature
    - Regional literature
    - Postmodernism
    - Prose fiction
  - Poetry
  - Drama

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In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain, with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle (literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The ...(100 of 41004 words)

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