The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
Language: English
Pages: 308
ISBN: 0521499143
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This volume provides a unique and valuable insight into the novel in French over the past two centuries. Essays by acknowledged experts range widely over issues and texts, referring to earlier periods and other genres and literatures where relevant. Theoretical discussion is combined with close reading, and there is a challenging reassessment of major figures and traditional views. All quotations are translated and there is a chronology and guide to further reading, making this an essential working manual for all those interested in modern French fiction.
The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics)
Antología de textos libertinos franceses del siglo XVII
Chemins de la liberte (final volume published 1949). 1946 Beginning of Indochina War. First Cannes Film Festival. 1947 Gide wins Nobel Prize for Literature. Beckett, Murphy (French translation). Camus, La Peste. 1949 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxieme Sexe. 1950 Start of Korean War. Duras, Un barrage contre le Pacifique. Nationwide television broadcasting begins in France. 1951 Gracq, Le Rivage des Syrtes (refuses to accept Prix Goncourt). Death of Gide. 1952 Mauriac wins Nobel Prize for
found again, she danced in the new cheerfulness of her life, she danced, lifted up in an indescribable rush']. The novelist whom contemporary critics considered the most important woman writing at the dawn of the new century, Marcelle Tinayre, also takes sentimental conventions as her starting point (Tinayre's most celebrated novels are La Maison du peche (1902) and La Rebelle (1906)). Employing the sentimental plot of contradiction, with, however, an ending of compromise rather than impasse,
perversity: they refused to privilege any particular source of sexual pleasure (see the memorable scene where Rachilde's La Jongleuse (1900) masturbates by embracing a large vase, in the presence of her scandalised suitor). What shocks one most today in decadent fiction is its horrific, detailed dramatisations of sadism. Most memorable among these are Octave Mirbeau's revolting scenes of ingenious torture in Le Jardin de supplices (1898). He does distance himself through exoticism. The setting is
with Andre David, 1928). The first novel depicts a necrophilic lighthouse keeper who sexually desecrates the corpses of female shipwreck victims. Along with Monsieur Venus, it is perhaps her best work. It creates a typically decadent setting of claustrophobic intensity, progressive social alienation and growing horror. The keeper's new assistant gradually discovers his superior's secret and finds a woman's severed, pickled head. The second uses a first-person male narrator to portray an emerging
convulsively to test the resistance of the flesh. The gesture - unseemly, close to absurd, and almost laughable - measures an obsession with violent death that foreshadows Tchen's suicide in a terrorist act that turns out to be without practical value to the insurrection. Removed from those around him by a death drive he recognises only in part, Tchen is momentarily paralysed by the emotion he feels following the murder he has just committed: 'Ce n'etait pas la peur, c'etait une epouvante a la
