Lost Generation
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"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." --Sholem Stein |
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French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France. For literature written in French by citizens of other Francophone nations see Francophone literature.
During the 20th century, France was more permissive than other countries 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). Additionally, Paris has been the home-in-exile to two American literary movements: the lost generation and the beat generation.
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Selected list of French literary classics
Fiction
- Middle Ages
- anonymous - La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland)
- Chrétien de Troyes - Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain, the Knight of the Lion), Lancelot, ou le Chevalier à la charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart)
- various - Tristan et Iseult (Tristan and Iseult)
- anonymous - Lancelot-Graal (Lancelot-Grail), also known as the prose Lancelot or the Vulgate Cycle
- Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung - Roman de la Rose ("Romance of the Rose")
- 16th century
- 17th century
- 18th century
- Voltaire - Candide
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse
- Denis Diderot - Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fatalist)
- 19th century
- Stendhal - Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma)
- Honoré de Balzac - La Comédie humaine ("The Human Comedy", a novel cycle which includes Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet)
- Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary, Salammbô, L'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education)
- Edmond and Jules de Goncourt - Germinie Lacerteux
- Guy de Maupassant - Bel Ami, La Parure (The Necklace), other short stories
- Émile Zola - Les Rougon-Macquart (a novel cycle which includes L'Assommoir, Nana and Germinal)
- Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)
- Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
- 20th century
- André Gide - Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), The Immoralist
- Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time)
- André Breton - Nadja
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night)
- Colette - Gigi
- Jean Genet - Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
- Albert Camus - L'Étranger (The Stranger)
- Michel Butor - La Modification
- Marguerite Yourcenar - Mémoires d'Hadrien
- Alain Robbe-Grillet - Dans le labyrinthe
- Georges Perec - La vie mode d'emploi
- Robert Pinget - Passacaille
Poetry
- François Villon - Les Testaments
- Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and other poets of "La Pléiade" - poems
- La Fontaine - The Fables
- Victor Hugo - Les Contemplations
- Alphonse de Lamartine - Méditations poétiques
- Charles Baudelaire - Les Fleurs du mal
- Paul Verlaine - Jadis et naguère
- Arthur Rimbaud - Une Saison en Enfer
- Stéphane Mallarmé - Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ("A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance")
- Guillaume Apollinaire - Alcools
- Francis Ponge
- Raymond Queneau
Theater
- Pierre Corneille - Le Cid, Horace
- Molière - Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, Dom Juan, L'Avare (The Miser), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, L'Ecole des femmes (The School for Wives)
- Jean Racine - Phèdre, Andromaque
- Marivaux - Jeu de l'amour et du hasard
- Beaumarchais - Le Barbier de Séville (The Barber of Seville), La Folle journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro)
- Edmond Rostand - Cyrano de Bergerac
- Jean Giraudoux - The Trojan War Will Not Take Place
- Jean Anouilh - Becket, Antigone
- Jean-Paul Sartre - No Exit
- Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot, Endgame
- Eugène Ionesco - The Bald Soprano, Rhinoceros
- Jean Genet - The Maids, The Blacks
Non-fiction
- Michel de Montaigne - The Essays
- Blaise Pascal - Les Pensées
- François de La Rochefoucauld - The Maxims
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, The Social Contract
- François-René de Chateaubriand - Genius of Christianity, Memoirs from Beyond Grave
- Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America
- Jules Michelet - Histoire de France, La Sorcière
- Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
- Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism, Being and Nothingness
Literary criticism
Poetry
- Main article: French poetry
See also
- French culture
- French art
- List of French language authors
- List of French language poets
- French science fiction
- Fantastique
- The Women of the French Salons
- Cabinet de lecture: A History of French Reading Rooms
- Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles
We like
Abbé Prévost - Guillaume Apollinaire - Georges Bataille - Sylvia Beach - Jean de Berg - Honoré de Balzac - Charles Baudelaire - Maurice Blanchot - André Breton - Jean-Pierre Brisset - Restif de la Bretonne - Albert Camus - Céline - Robert Desnos - Régine Deforges - Denis Diderot - Alexandre Dumas - Paul Eluard - Gustave Flaubert - Serge Gainsbourg - Théophile Gautier - Alain Robbe-Grillet - Michel Houellebecq - Victor Hugo - Joris Karl Huysmans - Alfred Jarry - Pierre Klossowski - Lautréamont - Gaston Leroux - Pierre Louÿs - André Pieyre de Mandiargues - Guy de Maupassant - Octave Mirbeau - Nerciat - Georges Perec - Pauvert - Marcel Proust - Raymond Queneau - Rachilde - Raymond Radiguet - Pauline Réage - Raymond Roussel - Marquis de Sade - Georges Simenon - Paul Valéry - Jules Verne - Théophile de Viau - Voltaire - Emile Zola
See also
- French literature of the 20th century
- Roman populaire
- Franco-American relations
- Artistic Montparnasse
- Expatriates
