French literature of the 20th century
Encyclopedia
20th-century French literature is literature written in French from 1900 to 1999. For literature made after 1999, see the article Contemporary French literature
. Many of the developments in French literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts. For more on this, see French art of the 20th century
.
This period spans the last decades of the Third Republic
(1871–1940) (including World War I), the period of World War II (the German occupation and the Vichy–1944, the provisional French government (1944–1946) the Fourth Republic
(1946–1958) and the Fifth Republic
(1959-). Important historical events for French literature include: the Dreyfus Affair
; French colonialism and imperialism in Africa, the Far East (French Indochina
) and the Pacific; the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962); the important growth of the French Communist Party
; the rise of Fascism
in Europe; the events of May 1968. For more on French history, see History of France
.
Twentieth century French literature did not undergo an isolated development and reveals the influence of writers and genres from around the world, including Walt Whitman
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka
, John Dos Passos
, Ernest Hemingway
, William Faulkner
, Luigi Pirandello
, the British and American detective novel
, James Joyce
, Jorge Luis Borges
, Bertolt Brecht
and many others. In turn, French literature has also had a radical impact on world literature.
Because of the creative spirit of the French literary and artistic movements at the beginning of the century, France gained the reputation as being the necessary destination for writers and artists. Important foreign writers who have lived and worked in France (especially Paris) in the twentieth century include: Oscar Wilde
, Gertrude Stein
, Ernest Hemingway
, William S. Burroughs
, Henry Miller
, Anaïs Nin
, James Joyce
, Samuel Beckett
, Julio Cortázar
, Vladimir Nabokov
, Eugène Ionesco
. Some of the most important works of the century in French were written by foreign authors (Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett).
For Americans in the 1920s and 1930s (including the so-called "Lost Generation
"), part of the fascination with France was also linked to freedom from Prohibition
. For African-Americans in the twentieth century (such as James Baldwin
), France was also more accepting of race and permitted greater freedom (in a similar way, Jazz was embraced by the French faster than in some areas in America). A similar sense of freedom from political oppression or from intolerance (such as anti-homosexual discrimination) has drawn other authors and writers to France. France has also been more permissive in terms of censorship, and many important foreign language novels were originally published in France while being banned in America: Joyce's Ulysses
(published by Sylvia Beach
in Paris, 1922), Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch
(both published by Olympia Press
), and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer
(published by Obelisk Press
).
") saw radical experiments in all genres and Symbolism
and Naturalism
underwent profound changes.
Alfred Jarry
united symbolism with elements from marionette theater and a kind of proto-surrealism. The stage was further radicalised both in the direction of expressionism (the "théâtre de l'oeuvre" of Aurélien Lugné-Poe
) and hyper-realism (the theater of André Antoine
). The theater director Jacques Copeau
emphasized training an actor to be a complete person and rejected the Italian stage for something closer to the Elizabethan model, and his vision would have a profound impact on the "Cartel" of the 1920s and 1930s (see below).
Guillaume Apollinaire
radicalized the Baudelairian poetic exploration of modern life in evoking planes, the Eiffel Tower and urban wastelands, and he brought poetry into contact with cubism through his Calligrammes, a form of visual poetry
. Inspired by Rimbaud, Paul Claudel
used a form of free verse to explore his mystical conversion to Catholicism. Other poets from this period include: Paul Valéry
, Max Jacob
(a key member of the group around Apollinaire), Pierre Jean Jouve
(a follower of Romain Rolland's "Unanism"), Valery Larbaud
(a translator of Whitman and friend to Joyce), Victor Segalen
(friend to Huysmans and Claudel), Léon-Paul Fargue
(who studied with Stéphane Mallarmé
and was close to Valéry and Larbaud).
In the novel, André Gide
's early works, especially L'Immoraliste (1902), pursue the problems of freedom and sensuality that symbolism had posed; Alain-Fournier
's novel Le Grand Meaulnes
is a deeply felt portrait of a nostalgic past.
But radical experimentation was not appreciated by all literary and artistic circles in the early century. Popular and bourgeois tastes were relatively conservative. The poetic dramas of Edmond Rostand
, especially Cyrano de Bergerac
in 1897, were immensely popular at the turn of the century, as too the "well-made" plays and bourgeois farces of Georges Feydeau
. Anatole France
, Maurice Barrès
, Paul Bourget
were leading authors of the period who employed fiction as a convenient vehicle for ideas about men and things. The tradition of the Balzac and Zola inspired roman-fleuve continued to exert a profound attraction, as in Romain Rolland
's Jean-Christophe (1906–1912).
Popular fiction and genre fiction at the start of the century also included detective fiction, like the mysteries of the author and journalist Gaston Leroux
who is credited with the first "locked-room puzzle" -- The Mystery of the Yellow Room, featuring the amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille (1908) -- and the immensely popular The Phantom of the Opera
(1910).
movement—which began in a café in Switzerland in 1916—came to Paris in 1920, but by 1924 the writers around Paul Éluard
, André Breton
, Louis Aragon
and Robert Desnos
-- heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud
's notion of the unconscious
-- had modified dada provocation into Surrealism
. In writing and in the visual arts, and by using automatic writing
, creative games (like the cadavre exquis) and altered states (through alcohol and narcotics), the surrealists tried to reveal the workings of the unconscious mind. The group championed previous writers they saw as radical (Arthur Rimbaud
, the Comte de Lautréamont
, Baudelaire, Raymond Roussel
) and promoted an anti-bourgeois philosophy (particularly with regards to sex and politics) which would later lead most of them to join the communist party. Other writers associated with surrealism include: Jean Cocteau
, René Crevel
, Jacques Prévert
, Jules Supervielle
, Benjamin Péret
, Philippe Soupault
, Pierre Reverdy
, Antonin Artaud
(who revolutionized theater), Henri Michaux
and René Char
. The surrealist movement would continue to be a major force in experimental writing and the international art world until the Second World War. The surrealists technique was particularly well suited for poetry and theater, although Breton, Aragon and Cocteau wrote longer prose works as well, such as Breton's novel '’Nadja’’.
or Edmond Jabès
, for example. Others, such as Georges Bataille
, created their own movement and group in reaction. The Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars
was close to Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob and the artists Chagall and Léger, and his work has similarities with both surrealism and cubism.
's novels—such as Voyage au bout de la nuit
(Journey to the End of Night) -- used an elliptical, oral and slang-derived style to rail against the hypocrisies and moral lapses of his generation (his anti-semitic tracts in the 1940s however lead to his condemnation for collaboration). Georges Bernanos
's novels used other formal techniques (like the "journal form") to further psychological exploration. Psychological analysis was also central to François Mauriac
's novels, although he would come to be seen by Sartre as representative of an outdated fatalism. Jules Romains
's 27 volume novel Les Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–1946), Roger Martin du Gard
's eight-part novel cycle Les Thibault (1922–1940), and Marcel Proust
's seven-part masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time
, 1913–1927) expanded on the roman-fleuve model. André Gide
continued to experiment with the novel, and his most sophisticated exploration of the limits of the traditional novel are found in The Counterfeiters
, a novel ostensibly about a writer trying to write a novel.
, Charles Dullin
, Gaston Baty
and Ludmila and Georges Pitoëff. They produced works by the French writers Jean Giraudoux
, Jules Romains
, Jean Anouilh
and Jean-Paul Sartre
, and also of Greek and Shakespearean theater, and works by Luigi Pirandello
, Anton Chekhov
and George Bernard Shaw
.
, André Malraux
and Albert Camus
. Sartre, Camus, Malraux and Simone de Beauvoir
(who is also famous as one of the forerunners of Feminist writing) are often called "existentialist writers", a reference to Sartre's philosophy of Existentialism
(although Camus refused the title "existentialist"). Sartre's theater, novels and short stories often show individuals forced to confront their freedom or doomed for their refusal to act. Malraux's novels of Spain and China during the civil wars confront individual action with historical forces. Similar issues appear in the novels of Henri Troyat
.
, along with Léopold Sédar Senghor
and Léon Damas
created the literary review L'Étudiant Noir which was a forerunner of the Négritude
movement.
and Indochina
, Algeria
), by their collective sense of guilt from the Vichy Regime, by their desire for renewed national prestige (Gaullism
), and by conservative social tendencies in education and industry.
Inspired by the theatrical experiments in the early half of the century and by the horrors of the war, the so-called avant-garde Parisian theater, "New Theater" or "Theatre of the Absurd
" around the writers Eugène Ionesco
, Samuel Beckett
, Jean Genet
, Arthur Adamov
, Fernando Arrabal
refused simple explanations and abandoned traditional characters, plots and staging. Other experiments in theatre involved decentralisation, regional theater, "popular theater" (designed to bring working classes to the theater), and theater heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht
(largely unknown in France before 1954), and the productions of Arthur Adamov
and Roger Planchon
. The Avignon festival was started in 1947 by Jean Vilar
who was also important in the creation of the T.N.P. or "Théâtre National Populaire
."
The French novel from the 1950s on went through a similar experimentation in the group of writers published by "Les Éditions de Minuit
", a French publisher; this "Nouveau roman
" ("new novel"), associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet
, Marguerite Duras
, Robert Pinget
, Michel Butor
, Samuel Beckett
, Nathalie Sarraute
, Claude Simon
, also abandoned traditional plot, voice, characters and psychology. To a certain degree, these developments closely paralleled changes in cinema in the same period (the Nouvelle Vague).
The writers Georges Perec
, Raymond Queneau
, Jacques Roubaud
are associated with the creative movement Oulipo
(founded in 1960) which uses elaborate mathematical strategies and constraints (such as lipogram
s and palindrome
s) as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration.
Poetry in the post-war period followed a number of interlinked paths, most notably deriving from surrealism (such as with the early work of René Char
), or from philosophical and phenomenological concerns stemming from Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin
, existentialism, the relationship between poetry and the visual arts, and Stéphane Mallarmé
's notions of the limits of language. Another important influence was the German poet Paul Celan
. Poets working within these philosophical/language concerns—especially concentrated around the review "L'Ephémère" -- include Yves Bonnefoy
, André du Bouchet
, Jacques Dupin
, Claude Esteban
, Roger Giroux
and Philippe Jaccottet
. Many of these ideas were also key to the works of Maurice Blanchot
. The unique poetry of Francis Ponge
exerted a strong influence on a variety of writers (both phenomenologists and those from the group "Tel Quel
"). The later poets Claude Royet-Journoud
, Anne-Marie Albiach
, Emmanuel Hocquard
, and to a degree Jean Daive
, describe a shift from Heidegger to Ludwig Wittgenstein
and a reevalution of Mallarmé's notion of fiction and theatricality; these poets were also influenced by certain English-language modern poets (such as Ezra Pound
, Louis Zukofsky
, William Carlos Williams
, and George Oppen
) along with certain American postmodern and avant garde poets loosely grouped around the language poetry movement (such as Michael Palmer
, Keith Waldrop
and Susan Howe
; with her husband Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop
has a profound association with these poets, due in no small measure to her translations of Edmond Jabès
and the prose of Paul Celan
into English).
The events of May 1968 marked a watershed in the development of a radical ideology of revolutionary change in education, class, family and literature. In theater, the conception of "création collective" developed by Ariane Mnouchkine
's Théâtre du Soleil refused division into writers, actors and producers: the goal was for total collaboration, for multiple points of view, for an elimination of separation between actors and the public, and for the audience to seek out their own truth.
The most important review of the post-1968 period -- "Tel Quel
" -- is associated with the writers Philippe Sollers
, Julia Kristeva
, Georges Bataille
, the poets Marcelin Pleynet
and Denis Roche, the critics Roland Barthes
, Gérard Genette
and the philosophers Jacques Derrida
, Jacques Lacan
.
Another post-1968 change was the birth of "Écriture féminine
" promoted by the feminist Editions des Femmes, with new women writers as Chantal Chawaf
, Hélène Cixous
, Luce Irigaray
...
From the 1960s on, many of the most daring experiments in French literature have come from writers born in French overseas departments or former colonies. This Francophone literature
includes the prize winning novels of Tahar ben Jelloun
(Morocco
), Patrick Chamoiseau
(Martinique
), Amin Maalouf
(Lebanon
) and Assia Djebar
(Algeria
).
Contemporary French literature
Contemporary French literature is French literature from the year 2000 to the present day.- Overview :The economic, political and social crises of contemporary France˜—exclusion, immigration, unemployment, racism, etc.—and the notion that France has lost its sense of identity and international...
. Many of the developments in French literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts. For more on this, see French art of the 20th century
French art of the 20th century
20th-century French art developed out of the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism that dominated French art at the end of the 19th century. The first half of the 20th century in France saw the even more revolutionary experiments of cubism, dada and surrealism, artistic movements that would have a...
.
Overview
French literature was profoundly shaped by the historical events of the century and was also shaped by—and a contributor to—the century's political, philosophical, moral, and artistic crises.This period spans the last decades of the Third Republic
French Third Republic
The French Third Republic was the republican government of France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed due to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, to 1940, when France was overrun by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the German and Italian occupations of France...
(1871–1940) (including World War I), the period of World War II (the German occupation and the Vichy–1944, the provisional French government (1944–1946) the Fourth Republic
French Fourth Republic
The French Fourth Republic was the republican government of France between 1946 and 1958, governed by the fourth republican constitution. It was in many ways a revival of the Third Republic, which was in place before World War II, and suffered many of the same problems...
(1946–1958) and the Fifth Republic
French Fifth Republic
The Fifth Republic is the fifth and current republican constitution of France, introduced on 4 October 1958. The Fifth Republic emerged from the collapse of the French Fourth Republic, replacing the prior parliamentary government with a semi-presidential system...
(1959-). Important historical events for French literature include: the Dreyfus Affair
Dreyfus Affair
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...
; French colonialism and imperialism in Africa, the Far East (French Indochina
French Indochina
French Indochina was part of the French colonial empire in southeast Asia. A federation of the three Vietnamese regions, Tonkin , Annam , and Cochinchina , as well as Cambodia, was formed in 1887....
) and the Pacific; the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962); the important growth of the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...
; the rise of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
in Europe; the events of May 1968. For more on French history, see History of France
History of France
The history of France goes back to the arrival of the earliest human being in what is now France. Members of the genus Homo entered the area hundreds of thousands years ago, while the first modern Homo sapiens, the Cro-Magnons, arrived around 40,000 years ago...
.
Twentieth century French literature did not undergo an isolated development and reveals the influence of writers and genres from around the world, including Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...
, the British and American detective novel
Detective fiction
Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...
, James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
and many others. In turn, French literature has also had a radical impact on world literature.
Because of the creative spirit of the French literary and artistic movements at the beginning of the century, France gained the reputation as being the necessary destination for writers and artists. Important foreign writers who have lived and worked in France (especially Paris) in the twentieth century include: Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
, Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
, James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
, Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
, Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
. Some of the most important works of the century in French were written by foreign authors (Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett).
For Americans in the 1920s and 1930s (including the so-called "Lost Generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
"), part of the fascination with France was also linked to freedom from Prohibition
Prohibition
Prohibition of alcohol, often referred to simply as prohibition, is the practice of prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, import, export, sale, and consumption of alcohol and alcoholic beverages. The term can also apply to the periods in the histories of the countries during which the...
. For African-Americans in the twentieth century (such as James Baldwin
James Baldwin (writer)
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.Baldwin's essays, for instance "Notes of a Native Son" , explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th century America,...
), France was also more accepting of race and permitted greater freedom (in a similar way, Jazz was embraced by the French faster than in some areas in America). A similar sense of freedom from political oppression or from intolerance (such as anti-homosexual discrimination) has drawn other authors and writers to France. France has also been more permissive in terms of censorship, and many important foreign language novels were originally published in France while being banned in America: Joyce's Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
(published by Sylvia Beach
Sylvia Beach
Sylvia Beach , born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, was an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris, where she was one of the leading expatriate figures between World War I and II.-Early life:...
in Paris, 1922), Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...
(both published by Olympia Press
Olympia Press
Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane...
), and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Cancer (novel)
Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the...
(published by Obelisk Press
Obelisk Press
Obelisk Press was an English language press based in Paris, France, which was founded by Jack Kahane in 1929.Kahane, a novelist, began the Obelisk Press after his publisher, Grant Richards, went bankrupt. Going into partnership with a printer, Kahane, as Cecil Barr, published his next novel...
).
From 1895 to 1914
The early years of the century (often called the "Belle époqueBelle Époque
The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque was a period in European social history that began during the late 19th century and lasted until World War I. Occurring during the era of the French Third Republic and the German Empire, it was a period characterised by optimism and new technological and medical...
") saw radical experiments in all genres and Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
and Naturalism
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
underwent profound changes.
Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side....
united symbolism with elements from marionette theater and a kind of proto-surrealism. The stage was further radicalised both in the direction of expressionism (the "théâtre de l'oeuvre" of Aurélien Lugné-Poe
Aurélien Lugné-Poe
Aurélien-François Lugné-Poë born Aurélien-François-Marie Lugné was a French actor, theatre director, and scenic designer best known for his work at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, one of the first theatrical venues in France to provide a home for the artists of the Symbolist Movement at the end of the...
) and hyper-realism (the theater of André Antoine
André Antoine
André Antoine was a French actor, theatre manager, film director, author, and critic who is considered the father of modern mise en scène in France.-Biography:...
). The theater director Jacques Copeau
Jacques Copeau
Jacques Copeau was an influential French theatre director, producer, actor, and dramatist. Before he founded his famous Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, he wrote theater reviews for several Parisian journals, worked at the Georges Petit Gallery where he organized exhibits of artists' works...
emphasized training an actor to be a complete person and rejected the Italian stage for something closer to the Elizabethan model, and his vision would have a profound impact on the "Cartel" of the 1920s and 1930s (see below).
Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
radicalized the Baudelairian poetic exploration of modern life in evoking planes, the Eiffel Tower and urban wastelands, and he brought poetry into contact with cubism through his Calligrammes, a form of visual poetry
Visual poetry
Visual poetry is poetry or art in which the visual arrangement of text, images and symbols is important in conveying the intended effect of the work. It is sometimes referred to as concrete poetry, a term that predates visual poetry, and at one time was synonymous with it.Visual poetry was heavily...
. Inspired by Rimbaud, Paul Claudel
Paul Claudel
Paul Claudel was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his verse dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism.-Life:...
used a form of free verse to explore his mystical conversion to Catholicism. Other poets from this period include: Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
, Max Jacob
Max Jacob
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
(a key member of the group around Apollinaire), Pierre Jean Jouve
Pierre Jean Jouve
Pierre Jean Jouve was a French writer, novelist and poet. No more info at the moment.-References:...
(a follower of Romain Rolland's "Unanism"), Valery Larbaud
Valery Larbaud
Valery Larbaud was a French writer.-Life:He was born in Vichy, Allier, the only child of a pharmacist. His father died when he was 8, and he was brought up by his mother and aunt. His father had been owner of the Vichy Saint-Yorre mineral water springs, and the family fortune assured him an easy...
(a translator of Whitman and friend to Joyce), Victor Segalen
Victor Segalen
Victor Segalen was a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic....
(friend to Huysmans and Claudel), Léon-Paul Fargue
Léon-Paul Fargue
Léon-Paul Fargue was a French poet and essayist.He was born in Paris, France on rue Coquilliére. As a poet he was noted for his poetry of atmosphere and detail. His work spanned numerous literary movements...
(who studied with Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
and was close to Valéry and Larbaud).
In the novel, André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
's early works, especially L'Immoraliste (1902), pursue the problems of freedom and sensuality that symbolism had posed; Alain-Fournier
Alain-Fournier
Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier , a French author and soldier. He was the author of a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes , which has been twice filmed and is considered a classic of French literature.-Biography:Alain-Fournier was born in La Chapelle-d'Angillon, in the Cher...
's novel Le Grand Meaulnes
Le Grand Meaulnes
Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his relationship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the...
is a deeply felt portrait of a nostalgic past.
But radical experimentation was not appreciated by all literary and artistic circles in the early century. Popular and bourgeois tastes were relatively conservative. The poetic dramas of Edmond Rostand
Edmond Rostand
Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism, and is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays provided an alternative to the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century...
, especially Cyrano de Bergerac
Cyrano de Bergerac (play)
Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play bears very scant resemblance to his life....
in 1897, were immensely popular at the turn of the century, as too the "well-made" plays and bourgeois farces of Georges Feydeau
Georges Feydeau
Georges Feydeau was a French playwright of the era known as the Belle Époque. He is remembered for his many lively farces.-Biography:Georges Feydeau was born in Paris, the son of novelist Ernest-Aimé Feydeau and Léocadie Bogaslawa Zalewska. At the age of twenty, Feydeau wrote his first comic...
. Anatole France
Anatole France
Anatole France , born François-Anatole Thibault, , was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters...
, Maurice Barrès
Maurice Barrès
Maurice Barrès was a French novelist, journalist, and socialist politician and agitator known for his nationalist and antisemitic views....
, Paul Bourget
Paul Bourget
Paul Charles Joseph Bourget , was a French novelist and critic.-Biography:He was born in Amiens in the Somme département of Picardie, France. His father, a professor of mathematics, was later appointed to a post in the college at Clermont-Ferrand, where Bourget received his early education...
were leading authors of the period who employed fiction as a convenient vehicle for ideas about men and things. The tradition of the Balzac and Zola inspired roman-fleuve continued to exert a profound attraction, as in Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
's Jean-Christophe (1906–1912).
Popular fiction and genre fiction at the start of the century also included detective fiction, like the mysteries of the author and journalist Gaston Leroux
Gaston Leroux
Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera , which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon...
who is credited with the first "locked-room puzzle" -- The Mystery of the Yellow Room, featuring the amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille (1908) -- and the immensely popular The Phantom of the Opera
The Phantom of the Opera
Le Fantôme de l'Opéra is a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serialisation in "Le Gaulois" from September 23, 1909 to January 8, 1910...
(1910).
Dada and Surrealism
The First World War generated even more radical tendencies. The DadaDada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
movement—which began in a café in Switzerland in 1916—came to Paris in 1920, but by 1924 the writers around Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
, André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
, Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
and Robert Desnos
Robert Desnos
Robert Desnos , was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.- Biography :...
-- heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
's notion of the unconscious
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
-- had modified dada provocation into Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. In writing and in the visual arts, and by using automatic writing
Automatic writing
Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...
, creative games (like the cadavre exquis) and altered states (through alcohol and narcotics), the surrealists tried to reveal the workings of the unconscious mind. The group championed previous writers they saw as radical (Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
, the Comte de Lautréamont
Comte de Lautréamont
Comte de Lautréamont was the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse , an Uruguayan-born French poet....
, Baudelaire, Raymond Roussel
Raymond Roussel
Raymond Roussel was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau...
) and promoted an anti-bourgeois philosophy (particularly with regards to sex and politics) which would later lead most of them to join the communist party. Other writers associated with surrealism include: Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
, René Crevel
René Crevel
René Crevel was a French writer involved with the surrealist movement.-Life:Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself. Crevel...
, Jacques Prévert
Jacques Prévert
Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain very popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. Some of the movies he wrote are extremely well regarded, with Les Enfants du Paradis considered one of the greatest films of all time.-Life and...
, Jules Supervielle
Jules Supervielle
Jules Supervielle was a French poet and writer born in Uruguay.Jules Supervielle always kept away from Surrealism which was dominant in the first half of the twentieth century...
, Benjamin Péret
Benjamin Péret
Benjamin Péret was a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement with his avid use of Surrealist automatism.-Biography:...
, Philippe Soupault
Philippe Soupault
Philippe Soupault was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He was active in Dadaism and later founded the Surrealist movement with André Breton...
, Pierre Reverdy
Pierre Reverdy
Pierre Reverdy was a French poet associated with surrealism and cubism.Pierre Reverdy was born in Narbonne and grew up near the Montagne Noire in his father's house. Reverdy came from a family of sculptors. His father taught him to read and write. He studied at Toulouse and Narbonne.Reverdy...
, Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
(who revolutionized theater), Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism...
and René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
. The surrealist movement would continue to be a major force in experimental writing and the international art world until the Second World War. The surrealists technique was particularly well suited for poetry and theater, although Breton, Aragon and Cocteau wrote longer prose works as well, such as Breton's novel '’Nadja’’.
Influence and dissidence
The influence of surrealism will be of great importance on poets like Saint-John PerseSaint-John Perse
Saint-John Perse was a French poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was also a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the USA until 1967.-Biography:Alexis Leger was...
or Edmond Jabès
Edmond Jabes
----Edmond Jabès was a Jewish writer and poet, and one of the best known literary figures to write in French after World War II.- Life :...
, for example. Others, such as Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
, created their own movement and group in reaction. The Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars
Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric Louis Sauser , better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.-Early years:...
was close to Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob and the artists Chagall and Léger, and his work has similarities with both surrealism and cubism.
Novel
In the early half of the century the novel too went through further changes. Louis-Ferdinand CélineLouis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
's novels—such as Voyage au bout de la nuit
Journey to the End of the Night
Journey to the End of Night is the first novel of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This semi-autobiographical work describes antihero Ferdinand Bardamu....
(Journey to the End of Night) -- used an elliptical, oral and slang-derived style to rail against the hypocrisies and moral lapses of his generation (his anti-semitic tracts in the 1940s however lead to his condemnation for collaboration). Georges Bernanos
Georges Bernanos
Georges Bernanos was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. Of Roman Catholic and monarchist leanings, he was a violent adversary to bourgeois thought and to what he identified as defeatism leading to France's defeat in 1940.-Biography:Bernanos was born at Paris, into a family of...
's novels used other formal techniques (like the "journal form") to further psychological exploration. Psychological analysis was also central to François Mauriac
François Mauriac
François Mauriac was a French author; member of the Académie française ; laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur .-Biography:...
's novels, although he would come to be seen by Sartre as representative of an outdated fatalism. Jules Romains
Jules Romains
Jules Romains, born Louis Henri Jean Farigoule , was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement...
's 27 volume novel Les Hommes de bonne volonté (1932–1946), Roger Martin du Gard
Roger Martin du Gard
Roger Martin du Gard was a French author and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature. Trained as a paleographer and archivist, Martin du Gard brought to his works a spirit of objectivity and a scrupulous regard for details...
's eight-part novel cycle Les Thibault (1922–1940), and Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
's seven-part masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." The novel is widely...
, 1913–1927) expanded on the roman-fleuve model. André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
continued to experiment with the novel, and his most sophisticated exploration of the limits of the traditional novel are found in The Counterfeiters
The Counterfeiters (novel)
The Counterfeiters is a 1925 novel by French author André Gide, first published in Nouvelle Revue Française...
, a novel ostensibly about a writer trying to write a novel.
Theater
Theater in the 1920s and 1930s went through further changes in a loose association of theaters (called the "Cartel") around the directors and producers Louis JouvetLouis Jouvet
Louis Jouvet was a renowned French actor, director, and theatre director.- Life :Overcoming speech impediments and sometimes paralyzing stage fright as a young man, Jouvet's first important association was with Jacques Copeau's Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, beginning in 1913...
, Charles Dullin
Charles Dullin
Charles Dullin was a French actor, theater manager and director.-Life:Dullin was a student of Jacques Copeau...
, Gaston Baty
Gaston Baty
Gaston Baty , whose full name was Jean-Baptiste-Marie-Gaston Baty, was a French playwright and director. His stage adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary was presented in an English translation on Broadway in 1937. Constance Cummings played the title role...
and Ludmila and Georges Pitoëff. They produced works by the French writers Jean Giraudoux
Jean Giraudoux
Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy...
, Jules Romains
Jules Romains
Jules Romains, born Louis Henri Jean Farigoule , was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement...
, Jean Anouilh
Jean Anouilh
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1943 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' Classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's...
and Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, and also of Greek and Shakespearean theater, and works by Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...
, Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
and George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
.
Existentialism
In the late 1930s, the works of Hemingway, Faulkner and Dos Passos came to be translated into French, and their prose style had a profound impact on the work of writers like Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, André Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
and Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
. Sartre, Camus, Malraux and Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
(who is also famous as one of the forerunners of Feminist writing) are often called "existentialist writers", a reference to Sartre's philosophy of Existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
(although Camus refused the title "existentialist"). Sartre's theater, novels and short stories often show individuals forced to confront their freedom or doomed for their refusal to act. Malraux's novels of Spain and China during the civil wars confront individual action with historical forces. Similar issues appear in the novels of Henri Troyat
Henri Troyat
Henri Troyat was a Russian born French author, biographer, historian and novelist.-Biography:Troyat was born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov, in Moscow to parents of mixed heritage, including Armenian, Russian, German and Georgian...
.
In the French colonies
The 1930s and 1940s saw significant contributions by citizens of French colonies and Aimé CésaireAimé Césaire
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".-Student, educator, and poet:...
, along with Léopold Sédar Senghor
Léopold Sédar Senghor
Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, politician, and cultural theorist who for two decades served as the first president of Senegal . Senghor was the first African elected as a member of the Académie française. Before independence, he founded the political party called the Senegalese...
and Léon Damas
Léon Damas
Léon-Gontran Damas was a French poet and politician. He was one of the founders of the Négritude movement.-Biography:...
created the literary review L'Étudiant Noir which was a forerunner of the Négritude
Négritude
Négritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politiciansin France in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas.The Négritude...
movement.
Literature after World War II
The 1950s and 1960s were highly turbulent times in France: despite a dynamic economy ("les trente glorieuses" or "30 Glorious Years"), the country was torn by their colonial heritage (VietnamVietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
and Indochina
Indochina
The Indochinese peninsula, is a region in Southeast Asia. It lies roughly southwest of China, and east of India. The name has its origins in the French, Indochine, as a combination of the names of "China" and "India", and was adopted when French colonizers in Vietnam began expanding their territory...
, Algeria
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...
), by their collective sense of guilt from the Vichy Regime, by their desire for renewed national prestige (Gaullism
Gaullism
Gaullism is a French political ideology based on the thought and action of Resistance leader then president Charles de Gaulle.-Foreign policy:...
), and by conservative social tendencies in education and industry.
Inspired by the theatrical experiments in the early half of the century and by the horrors of the war, the so-called avant-garde Parisian theater, "New Theater" or "Theatre of the Absurd
Theatre of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...
" around the writers Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
, Arthur Adamov
Arthur Adamov
Arthur Adamov was a playwright, one of the foremost exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd.Adamov was born in Kislovodsk in Russia to a wealthy Armenian family, which lost its wealth in 1917...
, Fernando Arrabal
Fernando Arrabal
Fernando Arrabal Terán is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist and poet. He settled in France in 1955, he describes himself as “desterrado,” or “half-expatriate, half-exiled.”...
refused simple explanations and abandoned traditional characters, plots and staging. Other experiments in theatre involved decentralisation, regional theater, "popular theater" (designed to bring working classes to the theater), and theater heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
(largely unknown in France before 1954), and the productions of Arthur Adamov
Arthur Adamov
Arthur Adamov was a playwright, one of the foremost exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd.Adamov was born in Kislovodsk in Russia to a wealthy Armenian family, which lost its wealth in 1917...
and Roger Planchon
Roger Planchon
Roger Planchon , was a French playwright, director, filmmaker.-Biography:...
. The Avignon festival was started in 1947 by Jean Vilar
Jean Vilar
Jean Vilar was a French man of the theatre, who created in 1947 the Avignon theatre festival.After he gave up his literature studies, in 1932 he followed in Paris a course of philosophy of Alain and the theatre courses of Charles Dullin...
who was also important in the creation of the T.N.P. or "Théâtre National Populaire
Théâtre National Populaire
The Théâtre National Populaire is a theatre now at Villeurbanne, France. It was founded in 1920 by Firmin Gémier in Paris. The theater's policy is to deliver quality entertainment accessible to the general public....
."
The French novel from the 1950s on went through a similar experimentation in the group of writers published by "Les Éditions de Minuit
Les Éditions de Minuit
Les Éditions de Minuit is a French publishing house which has its origins in the French Resistance of World War II and still publishes books today.-History:...
", a French publisher; this "Nouveau roman
Nouveau roman
The nouveau roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new...
" ("new novel"), associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...
, Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras was a French writer and film director.-Background:...
, Robert Pinget
Robert Pinget
Robert Pinget was a major avant-garde French writer, born in Switzerland, who wrote several novels and other prose pieces that drew comparison to Beckett and other major Modernist writers...
, Michel Butor
Michel Butor
-Life and work:Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Salonika, the United States, and Geneva...
, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute was a French lawyer and writer of Russian Jewish origin.-Life:Sarraute was born Natalia/Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo , 300 km north-east of Moscow in 1900 , and, following...
, Claude Simon
Claude Simon
Claude Simon was a French novelist and the 1985 Nobel Laureate in Literature. He was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and died in Paris, France....
, also abandoned traditional plot, voice, characters and psychology. To a certain degree, these developments closely paralleled changes in cinema in the same period (the Nouvelle Vague).
The writers Georges Perec
Georges Perec
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...
, Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot...
, Jacques Roubaud
Jacques Roubaud
Jacques Roubaud is a French poet and mathematician.Jacques Roubaud is a professor of poetry at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and he was a professor of Mathematics at University of Paris X...
are associated with the creative movement Oulipo
Oulipo
Oulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
(founded in 1960) which uses elaborate mathematical strategies and constraints (such as lipogram
Lipogram
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided — usually a common vowel, and frequently "E", the most common letter in the English language.Writing a lipogram is a trivial task...
s and palindrome
Palindrome
A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of units that can be read the same way in either direction, with general allowances for adjustments to punctuation and word dividers....
s) as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration.
Poetry in the post-war period followed a number of interlinked paths, most notably deriving from surrealism (such as with the early work of René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
), or from philosophical and phenomenological concerns stemming from Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was a major German lyric poet, commonly associated with the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his...
, existentialism, the relationship between poetry and the visual arts, and Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
's notions of the limits of language. Another important influence was the German poet Paul Celan
Paul Celan
Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
. Poets working within these philosophical/language concerns—especially concentrated around the review "L'Ephémère" -- include Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy is a French poet and essayist. Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher....
, André du Bouchet
André du Bouchet
André du Bouchet was a French poet.- Biography :Born in Paris, he lived in France until 1941, when his family left occupied Europe for the United States. He studied at Amherst College and then at Harvard University . After teaching for a year, he returned to France...
, Jacques Dupin
Jacques Dupin
Jacques Dupin is a French poet, art critic, and co-founder of the journal L'éphemère.A resident of Paris since 1944, he is director of publication at Galerie Maeght.- Jacques Dupin's poetry in English :...
, Claude Esteban
Claude Esteban
Claude Esteban was a French poet.Author of a major poetic œuvre of this last half-century, Claude Esteban wrote numerous essays on art and poetry and was the French translator, inter alia, of Jorge Guillén, Octavio Paz, Borges, García Lorca, or again, Quevedo.-Biography:Of Spanish father and...
, Roger Giroux
Roger Giroux
Roger Giroux was a French poet. Giroux's one book was awarded the Prix Max Jacob award. Translator of W.B. Yeats, Lawrence Durrell, and others. A sample of his poems is included in , edited by Paul Auster, and generally recognized as the best anthology of Modern French poetry in English...
and Philippe Jaccottet
Philippe Jaccottet
Philippe Jaccottet is a poet and translator who publishes in French.After completing his studies in Lausanne, he lived several years in Paris. In 1953, came to live in the town of Grignan in Provence...
. Many of these ideas were also key to the works of Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.-Works:...
. The unique poetry of Francis Ponge
Francis Ponge
Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
exerted a strong influence on a variety of writers (both phenomenologists and those from the group "Tel Quel
Tel Quel
Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...
"). The later poets Claude Royet-Journoud
Claude Royet-Journoud
Claude Royet-Journoud is a contemporary French poet and artist living in Paris .-Overview:Royet-Journoud's publications in French include his tetralogy, published between 1972 and 1997: Le Renversement, La Notion d'Obstacle, Les Objets contiennent l'infini, and Les Natures indivisibles...
, Anne-Marie Albiach
Anne-Marie Albiach
Anne-Marie Albiach is a contemporary French poet and translator.-Overview:Anne-Marie Albiach's poetry is characterized by, among other things, an inventive use of spacing on the printed page...
, Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard is a French poet who grew up in Tangier, Morocco. He served as the editor of the small press Orange Export Ltd., and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, edited two anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains ď aujourďhui and 49+1...
, and to a degree Jean Daive
Jean Daive
Jean Daive is a poet and translator. He is the author of novels, collections of poetry and has translated work by Paul Celan and Robert Creeley among others....
, describe a shift from Heidegger to Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
and a reevalution of Mallarmé's notion of fiction and theatricality; these poets were also influenced by certain English-language modern poets (such as Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, and George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
) along with certain American postmodern and avant garde poets loosely grouped around the language poetry movement (such as Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists...
, Keith Waldrop
Keith Waldrop
Keith Waldrop is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, and has translated the work of Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Edmond Jabès, among others. A recent translation is Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal .With his wife Rosmarie Waldrop, he co-edits Burning Deck Press...
and Susan Howe
Susan Howe
Susan Howe is a American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre...
; with her husband Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop
Rosmarie Waldrop
Rosmarie Waldrop is a contemporary American poet, translator and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s...
has a profound association with these poets, due in no small measure to her translations of Edmond Jabès
Edmond Jabes
----Edmond Jabès was a Jewish writer and poet, and one of the best known literary figures to write in French after World War II.- Life :...
and the prose of Paul Celan
Paul Celan
Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
into English).
The events of May 1968 marked a watershed in the development of a radical ideology of revolutionary change in education, class, family and literature. In theater, the conception of "création collective" developed by Ariane Mnouchkine
Ariane Mnouchkine
Ariane Mnouchkine is a world-renowned French stage director. She founded the Parisian avant-garde stage ensemble Théâtre du Soleil in 1964. She has written and directed 1789 and Molière , and in 1989, she directed La Nuit Miraculeuse...
's Théâtre du Soleil refused division into writers, actors and producers: the goal was for total collaboration, for multiple points of view, for an elimination of separation between actors and the public, and for the audience to seek out their own truth.
The most important review of the post-1968 period -- "Tel Quel
Tel Quel
Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...
" -- is associated with the writers Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel , published by Seuil, which ran until 1982...
, Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
, Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
, the poets Marcelin Pleynet
Marcelin Pleynet
Marcelin Pleynet was born in Lyon, France in 1933. Writer, essayist, poet, he was Managing Editor of the influential magazine Tel Quel from 1962 to 1982, and co-edits the journal L'Infini with Philippe Sollers. He was Professor of Aesthetics at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in...
and Denis Roche, the critics Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette is a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.-Life:...
and the philosophers Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
, Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
.
Another post-1968 change was the birth of "Écriture féminine
Écriture féminine
Écriture féminine, literally "women's writing," more closely, the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text, is a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the early 1970s and included foundational theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Monique...
" promoted by the feminist Editions des Femmes, with new women writers as Chantal Chawaf
Chantal Chawaf
Chantal Chawaf is a French writer.She was born in Paris, during the World War II. During her childhood, she studied art at l'Ecole du Louvre and literature. She travelled and lived for some years in Europe, in the Middle East and North America...
, Hélène Cixous
Hélène Cixous
Hélène Cixous is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College...
, Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One .-Biography:...
...
From the 1960s on, many of the most daring experiments in French literature have come from writers born in French overseas departments or former colonies. This Francophone literature
Francophone literature
Francophone literature is literature written in the French language. Most often the term is misused to refer only to literature from francophone countries outside France, but this category includes French Literature, or Literature of France, that is literature written by French authors...
includes the prize winning novels of Tahar ben Jelloun
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Tahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan poet and writer. The entirety of his work is written in French, although his first language is Arabic.-Life:...
(Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
), Patrick Chamoiseau
Patrick Chamoiseau
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement.-Biography:Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to...
(Martinique
Martinique
Martinique is an island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, with a land area of . Like Guadeloupe, it is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department. To the northwest lies Dominica, to the south St Lucia, and to the southeast Barbados...
), Amin Maalouf
Amin Maalouf
Amin Maalouf , born 25 February 1949 in Beirut, is a Lebanese-born French author. Although his native language is Arabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into many languages. He received the Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanios...
(Lebanon
Lebanon
Lebanon , officially the Republic of LebanonRepublic of Lebanon is the most common term used by Lebanese government agencies. The term Lebanese Republic, a literal translation of the official Arabic and French names that is not used in today's world. Arabic is the most common language spoken among...
) and Assia Djebar
Assia Djebar
Assia Djebar is the pen-name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen , an Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker. Most of her works deal with obstacles faced by women, and she is noted for her feminist stance. Djebar is considered to be one of North Africa's pre-eminent and most influential writers...
(Algeria
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...
).
See also
- France in Modern Times II (1920-today)
- Prix GoncourtPrix GoncourtThe Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year"...
- a French literary award for prose fiction, first awarded in 1903 - Prix FeminaPrix FeminaThe Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse . The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women...
- literary award since 1904 - Prix Apollinaire - a French literary award for poetry, first awarded in 1941
- Prix MédicisPrix MédicisThe Prix Médicis is a French literary award given each year in November. It was founded in 1958 by Gala Barbisan and Jean-Pierre Giraudoux. It is awarded to an author whose "fame does not yet match his talent."...
- literary award since 1958 - Hussards (literary movement)Hussards (literary movement)The Hussards was a French literary movement in the 1950s which opposed Existentialism and the figure of the politically engaged intellectual as personified by Jean-Paul Sartre.-Origins:...