A New History of French Literature

Denis Hollier

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN:
  9780674615663
  9780674615656
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674254619
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: Literature

Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows.

Written by 164 American and European specialists, the essays are introduced by date and arranged in chronological order, but here ends the book's resemblance to the usual history of literature. Each date is followed by a headline evoking an event that indicates the chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary—the publication of an original work, a journal, a translation, the first performance of a play, the death of an author—but some events are literary only in terms of their repercussions and resonances. Essays devoted to a genre exist alongside essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented side by side with literary movements, and large surveys appear next to detailed discussions of specific landmarks.

No article is limited to the "life and works" of a single author. Proust, for example, appears through various lenses: fleetingly, in 1701, apropos of Antoine Galland's translation of The Thousand and One Nights; in 1898, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair; in 1905, on the occasion of the law on the separation of church and state; in 1911, in relation to Gide and their different treatments of homosexuality; and at his death in 1922.

Without attempting to cover every author, work, and cultural development since the Serments de Strasbourg in 842, this history succeeds in being both informative and critical about the more than 1,000 years it describes. The contributors offer us a chance to appreciate not only French culture but also the major critical positions in literary studies today. A New History of French Literature will be essential reading for all engaged in the study of French culture and for all who are interested in it. It is an authoritative, lively, and readable volume.

Index

Works whose authorship is known are given under the authors’ names. Anonymous works and periodicals are listed by title.

’Abd-al-Qadir, 698–699

Abélard, Peter (Pierre Abélard), 45, 51; letters of Héloïse and, 95, 482–483

Abrabanel, Judah Leon (Leon Hebreo), 214; Dialoghi d’amore, 175

Abraham, Nicolas, 801–802

Abraham ibn Ezra, The Beginning of Wisdom, 4

Absolutism. See Monarchy, and absolutism

Absurd, the, 468, 469, 855, 913, 975; and absurdists, 608; theater of, 1006–1101

L’abusé en cour, 128

Académie de Sedan, 380

Académie Française (Institut de France, 1795–1816), 267–273, 273–274, 282, 294, 307, 308, 315, 354, 358, 364, 375–379, 392, 394, 418, 419, 433, 597, 617, 638, 641, 690, 828, 829, 880, 995, 1030, 1055, 1056, 1060; Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 178, 270–272, 299, 373, 375–376, 423, 449; Les sentiments de l’Académie sur Le Cid, 270–272, 274

Academies, 272, 318, 386, 597; imperial, 625; provincial, 294, 319; Revolutionary, 625. See also individual names; Salons, literary

Academy of Architecture, 268

Academy of Berlin, 11

Academy of Châlons-sur-Marne, 561

Academy of Dance, 268

Academy of Inscriptions and Letters (Little Academy), 170, 268, 272, 315, 819; Médailles sur les principaux événements du règne de Louis le Grand, 347

Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 687, 690, 691

Academy of Munich, 11

Academy of Music, 268, 336

Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 268, 314, 406, 477, 508, 625

Academy of Poetry and Music, 245, 254, 267

Academy of Sciences, 268, 386, 558; Description et perfection des arts et métiers, 449

Academy of the Poem in Set Rhymes (formerly Academy of Wit and Gallantry), 294

Academy of Vienna, 11

Acarie, Barbe Jeanne Avrillot (Marie de l’lncarnation), 255...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• On Writing Literary History
• 778: Entering the Date
• 842: The Birth of Medieval Studies
• 1050?: Saints’ Lives
• 1095: The Epic
• 1123?: Manuscripts
• 1127: The Old Provençal Lyric
• 1152: The Romances of Antiquity
• 1165: Erec et Enide
• 1175: Fables and Parodies
• 1180?: Marie de France
• 1181?: The Grail
• 1202: Old French Prose Historiography
• 1209?: Arthurian Romance in Prose
• 1210: The Fabliaux
• 1214, 27 July: Literature and History
• 1215, November: The Impact of Christian Doctrine
• 1225?: Generic Hybrids
• 1267: Medieval Rhetoric
• 1277, 7 March: Jean de Meun’s Le roman de la rose
• 1300?: Medieval Vernacular Drama
• 1342?: Lyricism in the Age of Allegory
• 1401, St. Valentine’s Day: Trials of Eros
• 1456: “I the Scholar François Villon”
• 1460?: Farces, Morality Plays, and Soties
• 1493: The Rhétoriqueurs
• 1512: Writing without Reserve
• 1517: Humanist Models
• 1526, July: Life-Saving Stories
• 1527: Margaret of Navarre
• 1528: Manners and Mannerisms at Court
• 1532: Rabelais and Textual Architecture
• 1534, Fall: Literary Banquets
• 1534, 17–18 October: Evangelism
• 1536: Emblems
• 1536, Summer: The Sonnet
• 1538, 6 March: Dialogue
• 1539: The Birth of French Lexicography
• 1541, July: Translation as Literature
• 1541, September: Calvin the Writer
• 1542: The Neoplatonic Debate
• 1544: The Architecture of Poetic Sequences
• 1549: A New Intellectual Elite
• 1550: Inspiration and Poetic Glory
• 1552: Renaissance Comedy
• 1553, March: The Origin of French Tragedy
• 1553, June: Antiquities and Antiquaries
• 1555, July: Petrarchism with a Difference
• 1555, 13 September: Books in Print
• 1562: Scientific Poetry
• 1563, 18 August: Anti-Dictator
• 1566: History and Vernacular Humanism
• 1572, 24 August: Poetry and Action
• 1573: From Mannerism to Baroque
• 1578: Antarctic France
• 1581: The Spectacle of Power
• 1595: Montaigne and His Readers
• 1609: Devout Humanism
• 1619: Pastoral Fiction
• 1627: The Age of the Technician
• 1634, 13 March: The Académie Française
• 1637: Toward French Classical Tragedy
• 1640: Problems in Logic and Rhetoric
• 1647: The Subject of Modern Discourse
• 1648, 26–28 August: The Sound of the Fury
• 1651: Cultural Life outside Paris
• 1654: The Salons and “Preciosity”
• 1657: Figures of Social and Semiotic Dissent
• 1660: Autocritical Dramaturgy
• 1661: From Roi Soleil to Louis le Grand
• 1664: Jansenist Tragedy
• 1668: Moralists
• 1673, 17 February: The Comic at Its Limits
• 1674: On the Sublime, Infinity, Je Ne Sais Quoi
• 1677: Historiography in the Age of Absolutism
• 1678: The Emergence of the Novel
• 1680, 21 October: The Comédie-Française
• 1685: Religious Controversies
• 1687: The Ancients and the Moderns
• 1689: Pedagogy
• 1694: Linguistic Absolutism
• 1697: Marginal Writing
• 1699: Racine and the French New Criticism
• 1700: Classics in the Making
• 1704: Sunset Years
• 1707?: Fêtes Galantes
• 1721: Others
• 1725: The Politics of Epistolary Art
• 1727: Portrait of the Philosopher as a Tramp
• 1734: Intricacies of Literary Production
• 1735: The Gender of the Memoir-Novel
• 1750: Beauty in Context
• 1751: Ordering Knowledge
• 1754?: Origins
• 1754: From Natural Philosophy to Scientific Discourse
• 1759, January: On Cultivating One’s Garden
• 1759, 23 April: Clearing the Stage
• 1759, August–September: Salons
• 1761, February: The Novel and Gender Difference
• 1761, December: What Was Enlightenment?
• 1762: Writing the Political
• 1769: Reason
• 1770: Kisses, en Taille Douce
• 1771: Diderot at the Crossroads of Speech
• 1772: Utopias
• 1774, 19 April: A War at the Opera
• 1782, March: Words and “the Thing”
• 1782, May: Autobiographical Acts
• 1784, 27 April: Pre-Revolution (a Comedy)
• 1787: Designing Women
• 1788: Civil Rights and the Wrongs of Women
• 1789: Seventeen Eighty-nine
• 1791, 13 January: Language under Revolutionary Pressure
• 1791, Summer: Pleasure, Perversion, Danger
• 1794, 8 June: Twilight of the Gods
• 1794, 25 July: Unfinished Work
• 1799, 10 October: The Ideologists
• 1800: The Melodramatic Imagination
• 1802, 14 April: Gothic Revival
• 1808, 17 March: Discipline and Melancholy
• 1814, 4 June: Restoration Freedom and Repression
• 1816, 8 May: Women’s Voices in Literature and Art
• 1820: The Lady in the Lake
• 1823: Romantic Historiography
• 1827, February: The Invention of the Renaissance
• 1827, December: Drama
• 1830, 27–29 July: An Oedipal Crisis
• 1833: The Scandal of Realism
• 1834: Romanticism and Social Vision
• 1835: Dialogues with the Muse
• 1836, 25 October: Egypt in Paris
• 1837: Fantastic Tales
• 1839: Body Bildung and Textual Liberation
• 1840: Discourses on Misery
• 1843, 9 June: Publishing Novels
• 1847, 23 December: Orientalism, Colonialism
• 1848: Class Struggles in France
• 1851, 2 December: Literature Deterritorialized
• 1852, 2 December: Bonapartism
• 1853: French Poe
• 1857: Two Trials
• 1859, 23 July: Poète Maudite
• 1859, 7 December: Exile from Within, Exile from Without
• 1866: The Dream of Stone
• 1869: Tics
• 1871, 15 May: Commune Culture
• 1873: Exit and Save
• 1874: Haute Couture and Haute Culture
• 1876: Idealism
• 1877: Nature, Society, and the Discourse of Class
• 1880: Prostitution in the Novel
• 1884: Decadence
• 1885, February: The Music of the Future
• 1885, June: The Liberation of Verse
• 1886: The Phantom’s Voice
• 1889: Commemoration and the Revolution
• 1892: Writing and the Dance
• 1895: Literature in the Classroom
• 1898: The Dreyfus Affair
• 1905, 9 December: On Schools, Churches, and Museums
• 1911: From Exoticism to Homosexuality
• 1913: Lyrical Ideograms
• 1914–1918: Visions of Death and Dissolution
• 1920: Bourgeois Sin
• 1922, 18 November: Death and Literary Authority
• 1924: From Text to Performance
• 1925, November: Mise en Abyme
• 1925, December: “I Cannot Abide Stupidity”
• 1928, 3 May: Amnesias
• 1929: “Odor di Femina” [Sic]
• 1931, March: Sadology
• 1931, June: Plenty of Nothing
• 1933, February: Negrophilia
• 1933, November: Americans in Paris
• 1933, December: “Terrorists Ask No Questions”
• 1934, 6 February: Birthrate and Death Wish
• 1935, 6 May: Staging the Plague
• 1937, March: The Avant-Garde Embraces Science
• 1937, 12 July: Committed Painting
• 1939: Surrealism and Négritude in Martinique
• 1940–1944: The Honor of Poets
• 1941: How Is Literature Possible?
• 1942: The Problem of Belief
• 1945, 6 February: Literature and Collaboration
• 1945, 15 October: Rebellion or Revolution?
• 1946, July: Samuel Beckett Emerges as a French Writer
• 1949: An Intellectual Woman in Postwar France
• 1953: The Nouveau Roman
• 1954, January: On Certain Tendencies of the French Cinema
• 1959, 9 January: The Ministry of Fate
• 1959, 28 October: The Theater of the Absurd
• 1960: As Is
• 1962, November: The School of Independence
• 1966: The Place of Poetry, the Poetry of Place
• 1968, February: Francophonie and Independence
• 1968, May: “Actions, No! Words, Yes!”
• 1973: French Lib
• 1975: “French Feminism”
• 1976, 15 November: Hubert Aquin and Quebec Literature
• 1985, 27 September: Friday Night Books
• 1989: How Can One Be French?
• Chronology
• Map of Modern France
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index