Conte (literature)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The conte-en-vers is therefore the real connecting link between the earlier folktale collections and the modern scientific collections, and is the real repository of the native and original humorous material for nearly two centuries (1650-1850), where little of an original nature and almost nothing native will be found in the jestbooks. The entire literature of the conte-en-vers, whether dated from the burlesque and Aretinesque academies of the 1550's in Italy, or from La Fontaine's contes, "tirés de Boccace" as he perfectly frankly admits, in the 1660's ... represents in sum an exceptionally large repertory of jokes and tales, purposely sought from the folk at a period when the jestbooks were already forgetful or contemptuous of folk sources, and far gone in sterile mutual plagiarism (Legman 1962, 237)."--"Toward a Motif-Index of Erotic Humor" (1962) by Gershon Legman |
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Conte is French for tale or story. It is a literary genre of tales, often short, characterized by fantasy or wit. They were popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the genre became merged with the short story in the nineteenth century. Distinguishing contes from other literary genres is notoriously difficult due to the various meanings of the French term conte that span folktales, fairy tales, short stories, oral tales, and fables.
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Etymology
The term is derived from Latin computare which means to count, to calculate.
Definition
Conte comes from the French word conter, "to relate". The French term conte encompasses a wide range of narrative forms that are not limited to written accounts. No clear English equivalent for conte exists in English as it includes folktales, fairy tales, short stories, oral tales, and to lesser extent fables. This makes conte notoriously difficult to define precisely.
A conte is generally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. In this sense, contes can be called novellas. Contes are contrasted with short stories not only in length but subject matter. Whereas short stories nouvelles) are about recent ("novel") events, contes tend to be either fairy tales or philosophical stories. Nouvelles, too, could be oral. Contes are often adventure stories, characterized by fantasy, wit, and satire. It may have moral or philosophical underpinnings, but is generally not interested in psychological depth or circumstantial detail. They may be profound, but not "weighty". These generic characteristics also contribute to their short length. Contes can be either in prose or verse.
History
Contes were popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The distinction between contes and short stories was largely obsolete by the nineteenth century when the genres became merged. Reflective of this, the English term "short story" was coined in 1884 by Brander Matthews.
Famous examples of contes include Contes et nouvelles en vers by Jean de La Fontaine, Histoires ou contes du temps passé by Charles Perrault, and Contes cruels by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the last of which spawned a subgenre called conte cruel.
Voltaire is said to have invented the genre of Conte philosophique, also practiced by Denis Diderot. However, according to Edmund Gosse, "those brilliant stories" by Voltaire – Candide, Zadig, L'Ingénu, La Princesse de Babylone, and The White Bull – "are not, in the modern sense, contes at all. The longer of these are romans (novels), the shorter nouvelles, not one has the anecdotical unity required by a conte." While it is possible that Voltaire drew inspiration to his contes from an oral source, namely his performances to Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon early in his career, he only published contes after his exile.
Francophone contes also exist outside of France. For instance, Lafcadio Hearn incorporated creole contes in his works.
Subgenres
Contes en vers
Contes en vers is a French literary genre of which the best known example is Jean La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers.
Fontaine's bawdy motifs of folktales signaled the beginning of a new genre in French folklore in the succeeding centuries.
Conte facétieux
Facetiae is a collection of humorous and indecent tales by Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), first published in 1470. It features such stories as "Of a Fool, Who Thought His Wife Had Two Openings" and "Visio Francisci Philelphi," the earliest recorded version of Carvel's ring. The collection is available in several English translations.
Conte licencieux
See also
- Racconter
- Ceci n'est pas un conte
- Anthology
- Conte cruel
- Drabble
- Flash fiction, also known as microfiction
- Irish short story
- Literary journal
- Minisaga
- Sketch story
- Tall tale
- Vignette
- Conte en vers
