French literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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 has been 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
See also
- Charles Baudelaire
- Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles
- Le fantastique, a substantial genre within French literature