A Short History of French Literature
Sarah Kay
Language: English
Pages: 356
ISBN: 0199291187
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book traces the history of French literature from its beginnings to the present. Within its remarkably brief compass, it offers a wide-ranging, personal, and detailed--though selective--account of major writers and movements. Developments in French literature are presented in an innovative way, not as an even sequence of literary events but as a series of stories told at varying pace and with different kinds of focus. Readers can thus take in the broad sweep of historical change, grasp the main characteristics of major periods, or enjoy a close appraisal of individual works and their contexts. The book is written in an accessible and non-technical style that will make it attractive both to students of French and to non-specialist readers.
plays—dramatized episodes from lives of the saints—become popular. Rutebeuf, as well as being an important pioneer of the dit, seems also to anticipate this transition from narrative saint’s life to miracle play, since he wrote examples of both. His Miracle de Theophile recasts for the stage a well-known miracle of the Virgin Mary in which she rescues a cleric who has sold his soul to the devil. In the fourteenth century there develops a cycle of forty such Miracles of the Virgin, based on
others—including the epic Protestant poets d’Aubigné and Du Bartas—emulated him. During and after the widespread disruption caused by the wars of religion, tastes and cultural patterns show signs of significant mutation. This is a period which is difficult to characterize owing to the sheer diversity of its literary production. One may nevertheless trace the emergence of a new literary economy which corresponds broadly to the increasing power and confidence of the court as a cultural as well as a
accessible vernacular style in which to speak of the most important issues. These characteristics look rather different, however, when one replaces them in the context of late sixteenth-century culture. Montaigne’s grandfather had bought his title to nobility; Montaigne thus belonged to the new noblesse de robe, a class of lawyers and regional administrators, rather than the old landed noblesse d’épée. He is deeply preoccupied with the values appropriate to the nobility, and there is a streak of
to a more or less coordinated effort to construct enduring norms for the use of French in speech and in writing, in prose and in verse. At the centre of this effort was the foundation of the Académie Française. This remarkably powerful institution evolved from an informal circle of writers who had been meeting since the late 1620s. In 1634, under the auspices of the king’s first minister the Cardinal de Richelieu, the Académie acquired an official status which was finally theatre: a retrospect 143
unsuccessful military adventures, and the king’s failing health had progressively stifled the energies of the court as a cultural organism. The career of Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, illustrates the constraints of court culture in this terminal period as well as its devout leanings. Highly favoured by Bossuet, Fénelon was the author of Télémaque, a novel in the style of the ‘Moderns’ about the son of Odysseus, and intended as an educational aid for the king’s grandson. However, an episode in
