The prodigious French Nobel laureate André Gide (1869–1951) originally published Lafcadio’s Adventures in La Nouvelle Revue Française in four installments, from January through April 1914; it appeared as a book later the same year. In 1933 Gide adapted it for… Read More ›
Considered by many to be the best novel by France’s François Mauriac (1885–1970), A Knot of Vipers contains those recurring central themes of alienation, error, and delusion, or simply “sin,” seen in most of his stories. The work also reveals… Read More ›
The 1932 publication of the cynical and darkly comic Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) sent immediate shock waves into a French literary world still reeling from the social and artistic disruptions of World War… Read More ›
Born in Brest, France, into a family with a strong background in the sciences, Alain Robbergrillet (1922–2008) was an agricultural engineer by training but became one of the leading exponents of what was known as the nouveau roman, or “new… Read More ›
The reclusive French writer Marcel Proust, now considered by many scholars as the greatest novelist of the 20th century, labored for more than 14 years and died while still adding to what would eventually be a seven-volume masterpiece. The novel… Read More ›
Despite André Gide’s claims otherwise, his novel The Immoralist is clearly autobiographical. Gide (1869–1951), one of the most significant novelists of the first half of the 20th century and winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in literature, went to great… Read More ›
With her controversial 1986 novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, one of the most respected of Guadeloupe’s several powerful writers, Maryse Condé 1934– ) has produced one of the African diaspora’s literary classics. I, Tituba explores the interwoven psychosocial,… Read More ›
The Disciple, one of Paul Bourget’s (1852–1935) greatest literary achievements and his most famous novel, marked a change in the author’s literary development. Prior to this work, his fiction consisted of highly dramatic tales set in high society; with The… Read More ›
One of François Mauriac’s first novels, establishing his literary fame, The Desert of Love exhibits a recurring concern in his works, that of the tortures of the flesh and its world of loneliness and separation, as suggested by the title…. Read More ›
The Counterfeiters was first published in Paris in 1926, although its French author, André Gide (1869–1951), began the three-part novel in 1922. A winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in literature, Gide considered The Counterfeiters his only true novel. Its… Read More ›
The French novel Cosmopolis, written in 1893 and translated into English the same year, is indicative of the earlier fiction of Paul Bourget (1852–1935), telling the story of a complicated love triangle set against the backdrop of Rome as the… Read More ›
The popular author Colette (1873–1954) was born on January 28, 1873, in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Burgundy, France. Author of more than 50 novels and numerous short stories, and articles for periodicals, she wrote from her early 20s through her mid-70s. This acclaimed… Read More ›
Set in postwar Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Stalinist purges of World War II, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is “a novel in the form of variations” that explores how totalitarianism affects individual and collective, national and personal,… Read More ›
Black Shack Alley is Keith Q. Warner’s English translation of the classic French novel La Rue Cases-Nègres by Joseph Zobel (1915–2006). The title of Zobel’s work means “Breaking Negroes [Slaves] Street.” Black Shack Alley is an autobiographical text that evolves… Read More ›
It is no accident that references to the literary ideas and example of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) abound in contemporary literary criticism and theory. The great French poet’s notoriously refined aestheticism and fervent devotion to language led him to expound a… Read More ›
Twentieth century art in many areas is indebted to Jean Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963). His accomplishments span the artistic and literary activities of his times, the diversity unified by his vision of all art as facets… Read More ›
His plays are concerned with expressing his own feeling of helplessness and solitude when confronted with the despair and loneliness of man caught in the hall of mirrors of the human condition, inexorably trapped by an endless progression of images… Read More ›
Nothing happens in Endgame and that nothing is what matters. The author’s feeling about nothing also matters, not because it is true or right but because it is a strongly formed attitude, a felt and expressed viewpoint. . . …. Read More ›
Farce is tragedy played at about a hundred and twenty revolutions a minute. The story of Othello and the plot of Feydeau’s Puce à l’Oreille have a striking similarity. Desdemona’s lost handkerchief and Victor Emmanuel Chandebise’s missing braces both give… Read More ›
Whenever evoked in a modern or a postmodern cultural context, even outside France, Tartuffe still carries with it a considerable amount of polemical baggage. It may be argued that it delves far closer to the level of persistent cultural preoccupation… Read More ›
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