VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way into a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide.
The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. The VSI Library now contains over 200 volumes-a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophyto conceptual art and cosmology-and will continue to grow to a library of around 300 titles.
Very Short Introductions available now:
AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone
AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS L. Sandy Maisel
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY Charles O. Jones
ANARCHISM Colin Ward
ANCI ENT EGYPT Ian Shaw
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas
ANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom
ANGLICANISM MarkChapman
THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair
ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia
ANTISEMITISM Steven Beller
THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS Paul Foster
ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn
ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ba Ila ntyne
ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes
ART H I STORY Dana Arnold
ARTTHEORY Cynthia Freeland
ATH E I SM Julian Baggini
AUGUSTINE Henry Chadwick
AUTISM Uta Frith
BARTH ES Jonathan Culler
BESTSELLERS John Sutherland
THE BIBLE John Riches
BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY EricH.Cline
BIOGRAPHY HermioneLee
THE BOOK OF MORMON Terryl Givens
THE BRAIN Michael O'Shea
BRITISH POLITICS Anthony Wright
BUDDHA Michael Carrithers
BUDDHISM Damienl
BUDDHIST ETHICS Damienl
CAPITALISM James Fulcher
CATHOLICISM GeraldO'Collins
THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe
CHAOS Leonard Smith
CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham
CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson
CHRISTIANITY LindaWoodhead
CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy
CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY Helen Morales
CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson
CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard
THE COLD WAR Robert McMahon
COMMUNISM Leslie Holmes
CONSCIOUSNESS Susan Blackmore
CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass
CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley
COSMOLOGY Peter Coles
THE CRUSADES ChristopherTyerman
CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy
DADA AND SURREALISM David Hopkins
DARWIN Jonathan Howard
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS TimothyLim
DEMOCRACY Bernard Crick
DESCARTES Tom Sorell
DESERTS Nick Middleton
DESIGN John Heskett
DINOSAURS David Norman
DOCUMENTARY FILM Patricia Aufderheide
DREAMING ].Allan Hobson
DRUGS Leslielversen
THE EARTH Martin Redfern
ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta
EGYPTIAN MYTH Geraldine Pinch
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford
THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball
EMOTION Dylan Evans
EMPIRE Stephen Howe
ENGELS Terrell Carver
EPIDEMIOLOGY RoldolfoSaracci
ETH ICS Simon Blackburn
THE EUROPEAN UNION John Pinder and Simon Usherwood
EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth
EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn
FASCISM I
FASHION Rebecca Arnold
FEMINISM Margaret Walters
THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard
FORENSIC SCIENCE Jim Fraser
FOSSILS Keith Thomson
FOUCAULT Gary Gutting
FREE SPEECH NigelWarburton
FREE WILL Thomas Pink
FRENCH LITERATURE John D. Lyons
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle
FREUD AnthonyStorr
FUNDAMENTALISM MaliseRuthven
GALAXIES John Gribbin
GALI LEO Stillman Drake
GAME THEORY Ken Binmore
GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh
GEOGRAPHY John Matthews and David Herbert
GEOPOLITICS I
GERMAN LITERATURE Nicholas Boyle
GLOBAL CATASTROPHES BillMcGuire
GLOBAL WARMING MarkMaslin
GLOBALIZATION Manfred Steger
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL Eric Rauchway
HABERMAS James Gordon Finlayson
HEGEL Peter Singer
HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood
HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson
HINDUISM Kim Knott
HISTORY John H. Arnold
THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin
THE HISTORY OF LIFE Michael Benton
THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE William Bynum
THE HISTORY OF TI ME Leofranc Holford-Strevens
HIV/AIDS Alan Whiteside
HOBBES RichardTuck
HUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood
HUMAN RIGHTS AndrewClapham
HUMS A.J.Ayer
IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton
INFORMATION LucianoFloridi
INNOVATION Mark Dodgson and David Gann
INTELLIGENCE lanJ.Deary
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION I
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Paul Wilkinson
ISLAM MaliseRuthven
ISLAMIC HISTORY Adam Silverstein
JOURNALISM Ian Hargreaves
JUDAISM NormanSolomon
JUNG AnthonyStevens
KABBALAH Joseph Dan
KAFI
KANT RogerScruton
KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner
THE KORAN Michael Cook
LAW Raymond Wacks
THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS Peter Atkins
LINCOLN Allen C. Guelzo
LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews
LITERARY TH EORY Jonathan Culler
LOCKE John Dunn
LOGIC Graham Priest
MACH IAVELLI Quentin Skinner
THE MARQUIS DE SADE John Phillips
MARX Peter Singer
MATHEMATICS TimothyGowers
THE MEANING OF LIFE Terry Eagleton
MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope
MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths
MEMORY Jonathan K. Foster
MODERN ART David Cottington
MODERN CHINA Rana Mitter
MODERN IRELAND SeniaPa"seta
MODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-jones
MOLECULES Philip Ball
MORMONISM Richard Lyman Bushman
MUSIC Nicholas Cook
MYTH Robert A. Segal
NATIONALISM Steven Grosby
NELSON MANDELA EllekeBoehmer
NEOLIBERALISM Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy
THE NEW TESTAMENT Luke TimothyJohnson
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE Kyle Keefer
NEWTON RobertIliffe
N I ETZSCH E Michael Tanner
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew
THE NORMAN CONQUEST George Garnett
NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland
NOTHING Franl
NUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M. Siracusa
THE OLD TESTAMENT Michael D. Coogan
PARTICLE PHYSICS Franl
/> PAUL E.P. Sanders
PHILOSOPHY Edward Craig
PHILOSOPHY OF LAW Raymond Wacks
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE SamirOl
PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards
PLATO JuliaAnnas
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY David Miller
POLITICS Kenneth Minogue
POSTCOLONIALISM RobertYoung
POSTMODERNISM Christopher Butler
POSTSTRUCTURALISM Catherine Belsey
PREHISTORY ChrisGosden
PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne
PRIVACY Raymond Wacks
PROGRESSIVISM Walter Nugent
PSYCHIATRY Tom Burns
PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus
PURITANISM FrancisJ.Bremer
THE QUAKERS Pink Dandelion
QUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne
RACISM Ali Rattansi
THE REAGAN REVOLUTION GilTroy
THE REFORMATION PeterMarshall
RELATIVITY Russell Stannard
RELIGION IN AMERICA TimothyBeal
THE RENAISSANCE JerryBrotton
RENAISSANCE ART Geraldine A. Johnson
ROMAN BRITAIN PeterSalway
THE ROMAN EMPIRE Christopher Kelly
ROUSSEAU RobertWokler
RUSSELL A. C. Grayling
RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catrional
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith
SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone
SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway
SCIENCE AND RELIGION Thomas Dixon
SCOTLAND Rab Houston
SEXUALITY VeroniqueMottier
SHAKESPEARE GermaineGreer
SIKHISM Eleanor Nesbitt
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and PeterJust
SOCIALI SM Michael Newman
SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce
SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor
THE SOVIET UNION Stephen Lovell
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham
SPINOZA RogerScruton
STATISTICS DavidJ.Hand
STUART BRITAIN John Morrill
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY Stephen Blundell
TERRORISM CharlesTownshend
TH LO LOGY David F. Ford
THOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr
TRAGEDY Adrian Poole
THE TUDORS John Guy
TWENTIETH-CENTURY B RITAIN Kenneth 0. Morgan
THE UNITED NATIONS Jussi M. Hanhimal
THE VI KI N65 Julian Richards
WITCHCRAFT Malcolm Gaskill
WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling
WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman
THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION AmritaNarlikar
WRITING AND SCRIPT Andrew Robinson
Available soon:
FILM MUSIC Kathryn Kalinak
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY Andrew Bowie
DRUIDS Barry Cu n l iffe
FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY David Canter
ADVERTISING Winston Fletcher
For more information visit our website www.oup.co.ukjgeneraljvsij
John D. Lyons
List of illustrations xi
Introduction: meeting French literature 1
Saints, werewolves, knights, and a poete maudit: allegiance and character in the Middle Ages 5
The last Roman, `cannibals', giants, and heroines of modern life: antiquity and renewal 18
3 Society and its demands 32
4 Nature and its possibilities 46
r_ Around the Revolution 58
6 The hunchback, the housewife, and the flaneur 72
From Marcel to Rrose Selavy 88
The self-centred consciousness 104
French-speaking heroes without borders? 117
Further reading 129
Index 133
1 Charlemagne finds Roland's corpse after the battle of Roncevaux, from Les Grandes Chroniques de France, c.1460 10
© Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris/ Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
2 Illustration by Gustave Dore (1854) for Rabelais's Gargantua (1534) 25
© akg-images
3 Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, designed by Louis Le Van, in an engraving by Perelle (1660) 34
© akg-images
4 Engraving by Francois Chauveau (1668) for La Fontaine's fable Le Loup et le chien 36
5 Scene from Bernardin de SaintPierre's novel Paul et Virginie (1787), in a 1805 engraving after Francois Gerard 55
© Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris/ Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library
6 Napoleon Bonaparte throwing a Marquis de Sade book into the fire, drawing attributed to P. Cousturier (1885) 62
© Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
7 Voltaire's remains are transferred to the Pantheon, 1791, engraving after Lagrenee 65
© Roger-Viollet/TopFoto
8 Bust by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, entitled `Why be born a slave?' (1868) 68
Courtesy of the Image of the Black in Western Art Project and Photo Archive, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
9 Engraving by Luc-Olivier Merson (1881) inspired by Victor Hugo's novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831) 74
Cc) Roger-Viollet/TopFoto
10 Maxime Lalanne (1827-86), `Demolition work for the construction of the Boulevard Saint-Germain', scene from Haussmann's renovations of Paris 84
© MusEe Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet/ TopFoto
11 Claude Monet, La Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) 85
© The Granger Collection/TopFoto
12 Page of Stephane Mallarme's poem, Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) 87
© Roger-Viollet/TopFoto
13 `Les yeux de fougere, photographic montage illustration for Andre Breton's Nadja (1928) 96
(c© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2009
14 Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, c. 1920-1, in a photograph by Man Ray 101
n Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2009. Photo n The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
15 Lucien Raimbourg and Pierre Latour in Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot, photograph from the 1956 Paris production by Roger Blin 107
© Roger-Viollet/TopFoto
16 Scene from Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) 115
n Argos/Como/Pathe Overseas/ DAIEI Motion Pictures/Album/ akg-images
The heritage of literature in the French language is rich, varied, extensive in time and space, and appealing both to its immediate public, readers of French, and also to a global audience reached through translations and film adaptations. The first great works of this repertory were written in the 11th century in northern France, and now, at the beginning of the 21st century, French literatures include authors writing in many parts of the world, ranging from the Caribbean to Western Africa, whose works are available in bookshops and libraries in France and in other French-speaking countries. For many centuries, French was also a language of aristocratic and intellectual elites throughout Europe.
What is `French literature'?
Both `French' and `literature' are problematic terms. What are the boundaries of `French'? Historically, the effective domination of the `French' language among the population living within the boundaries of today's `France' was realized only at the end of the 19th century, when universal schooling brought the language of Paris and the elites to the speakers of such tongues as Breton (Brezhoneg) spoken on the Brittany peninsula, Basque (Euskara) on the southwest coast, varieties of Occitanian (Lenga d'oc) such as Gascon and Provencal in the south, and Alsatian (Elsasserditsch) in the northeast. Moreover, there are many important authors who have written and now write in French who do not live within the borders of the European territory known as `France', though in many cases they are citizens of France (the residents of Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia, and so forth) or of former colonies of France such as Quebec and Senegal. Some authors whose first language is not French have chosen to write a significant portion of their work in French, for instance Samuel Beckett. Other authors, born in France and French citizens, h
ave chosen not to write in `French': Frederic Mistral, like Beckett a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in Provencal. As for `literature', the current use of the term dates from the 19th century, when what had long been called `poetry' or belles lettres was amalgamated with other writings such as memoirs and essays as the basis for literary studies in universities. It is a bit flippant, but useful, to think of literature as what we read when we do not have to - what we read without immediate, circumstantial purpose.
The protagonist as starting point
To get one's bearings in French literature means, in part, to have some idea of the major texts of the evolving tradition and a sense of how they relate and respond to one another. Coming into that tradition can be, at first, disorienting. Fortunately, perhaps, the situation of having to relate to an unfamiliar society and of having to determine one's own place while observing other people is a central topic of some of the principal texts of the French tradition. Whether by their choice or by circumstance, the protagonists of many French texts find themselves in situations of opposition to, or isolation from, most other members of their society. This is often a literary device for authors to make critical, polemical, or didactic points (and French literature can be called justly a literature of ideas), but it may also be a source of emotional turmoil that offers the reader an experience of empathy, rather than a purely intellectual insight.
It makes sense to look at literary works in terms of their central characters, or protagonists, since throughout history, epics, tragedies, short stories, and poems have very often taken the name of the protagonist as their title, whether it be Beowulf or Hamlet in English, or, in French, Lancelot, Gargantua, The Misanthrope, Chatterton, Consuelo, Madame Bovary, `Le Mauvais vitrier' (The Bad Glazier), Cyrano de Bergerac, Nadja, The Story of O. But even in works that do not feature the central character's name in the title, the focus on his or her characteristics, thoughts, and actions makes the protagonist an obvious place to start an exploration of the literature. And it should be noted that the term `protagonist' also applies to works, like many poems and autobiographical texts, in which the main figure is some version of the author ('some version' in the sense that we often assume a creative reworking of the first-person speaker, as when Ronsard embellishes or mythifies `Ronsard' in his love poetry, or when Rousseau writes of himself in his Confessions). And since most works that make up the literary tradition have central characters, their study offers a convenient way to compare works to one another, within a single period or from one epoch to another.
Protagonists necessarily have problems. If they did not, there would be no story, no quest, no obstacle to overcome, no mysteries to solve, no desire to satisfy, no enemy to defeat. In the French literary tradition, moreover, the central figures often have problems of such a unique type as to warrant being called `problematic heroes' - heroes and heroines whose very status and place in society is at stake - or even `anti-heroes' (defined by the OED as chief characters who are `totally unlike a conventional hero'). What kind of person is chosen as focal point of the plot and that person's relation to her or his society can tell us a good deal about a literary text and its time, whether that character is portrayed as very good within prevailing social norms or very unusual in an undesirable way. For instance, Rousseau's character `Emile' in Emile, or, On Education (1762) is neither the most complex nor most believable character of the time, but he presented a revolutionary model of human nature and of the consequences for childrearing.
French Literature: A Very Short Introduction Page 1