Abstract
The most profound challenge to the Naturalist legacy in the novel came from Marcel Proust (1871–1922) in À la recherche du temps perdu (published 1913–27). All of Proust’s early work was in one form or another a preparation for this novel, which he began writing in July 1909.1 Reading Ruskin had confirmed his sense of the over-riding importance of art; translating him had reinforced the apprenticeship of writing also evident in his pastiches of the style of major French writers.2 In the fragments of Jean Santeuil, he described the pleasure derived from identifying elements common to sensations in the past and present. In Contre Sainte-Beuve, what began as an attack on the biographical approach to literary history developed into a series of autobiographical texts in which essential characters and themes of À la recherche were developed towards their final form. Just as the critical work extended into episodes of fiction, the novel incorporated across its length an analysis of the nature of literature, ending with the narrator’s discovery of the means to write the novel which Proust was drawing to a close.
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See Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust et le roman (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971);
Jean-Pierre Richard, Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974);
Maya Slater, Humour in the Works of Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979);
J. M. Cocking, Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
Leighton Hodson (ed.), Marcel Proust. The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1989);
Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible. Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994);
Michael Sprinkler, History and Ideology in Proust: ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ and the Third French Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See William W. Holdheim, Theory and Practice of the Novel. A Study on André Gide (Geneva: Droz, 1968);
David H. Walker, André Gide (London: Macmillan, 1990).
See Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960), vol. I, pp. 988–1014.
See Maurice Rieuneau, Guerre et révolution dans le roman français 1919–1939 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974);
Frank Field, Three French Writers and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975);
Holger Klein (ed.), The First World War in Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1976);
John Cruickshank, Variations on Catastrophe: Some French Responses to the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982);
Jean Relinger, Henri Barbusse: écrivain combattant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).
See John Flower, Literature and the Lep in France (London: Methuen, 1985).
See E. Tonnet-Lacroix, Après-guerre et sensibilités littéraires (1919–1924) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991).
On Giraudoux and the poetic novel see ‘L’Âge du roman poétique (1920–1930)’, in Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman (Paris: José Corti, 1967), pp. 224–43. On Ramuz see David G. Bevan, The Art and Poetry of Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (New York: Oleander Press, 1977). On Giono see
Pierre Citron, Giono, 1895–1970 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990).
See Calogero Giardina, L’Imaginaire dans les romans de Raymond Radiguet (Paris: Didier, 1991).
See Nicholas Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Learnington Spa, Hamburg, New York: Berg, 1987);
Ian Noble, Language and Narration in Céline’s Writings (London: Macmillan, 1987).
See Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu la Rochelle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979);
Marie Balvet, Itinéraire d’un intellectuel vers le fascisme: Drieu la Rochelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984);
Rima Drell Reck, Drieu la Rochelle and the Picture Gallery Novel: French Modernism in the Inter-War Years (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
See Olivier Rony, Jules Romains ou l’appel au monde (Paris: Laffont, 1992).
See Alan Rose, Surrealism and Communism. The Early Years (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
See Roger Cardinal, Breton: ‘Nadja’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1986).
See Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, Aragon romancier (Paris: SEDES, 1989).
See W. D. Redfern, Paul Nizan: Committed Literature in a Conspiratorial World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972);
Bernard Alluin and Jacques Deguy (eds), Paul Nizan écrivain (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1988);
Michael Scriven, Paul Nizan: Communist Novelist (London: Macmillan, 1988).
See P. M. Cryle, The Thematics of Commitment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), ch. VI, pp. 218–41.
See Susan R. Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions. The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
See J. E. Flower, Writers and Politics in Modern France (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977);
Mary Jean Green, Fiction in the Historical Present: French Writers and the Thirties (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1986);
Alice Yager Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986);
Geraldi Leroy and Anne Roche, Les Écrivains et le Front Populaire (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1986);
Nicholas Hewitt, ‘Les Maladies du Siècle’: The Image of Malaise in French Fiction and Thought in the Inter-War Years (Hull: Hull University Press, 1988).
See Cecil Jenkins, André Malraux (Boston: Twayne, 1972);
Thomas Jefferson Kline, André Malraux and the Metamorphosis of Death (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1973);
Robert S. Thornberry, André Malraux et l’Espagne (Geneva: Droz, 1977);
Barrie Cadwallader, Crisis of the European Mind: A Study of André Malraux and Drieu la Rochelle (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1981);
David G. Bevan (ed.), Via Malraux: Essays by Walter Langlois (Wolfville: The Malraux Society, 1986);
Geoffrey T. Harris, André Malraux: A Re-evaluation (London: Macmillan, 1995).
See Malcolm Scott, Mauriac: The Politics of a Novelist (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1980) and The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists 1850–1970 (London: Macmillan, 1989);
John E. Flower and Bernard C. Swift (eds), François Mauriac: Visions and Reappraisals (Oxford, New York, Munich: Berg, 1989); François Mauriac et les romanciers de l’inquiétude de 1914 à 1945 (Paris: Grasset, 1991).
See Gerda Blumenthal, The Poetic Imagination of Georges Bernanos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965);
J. E. Flower, Bernanos: ‘Journal d’un curé de campagne’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1970);
Colin W. Nettlebeck, Les Personnages de Bernanos romancier (Paris: Minard, 1970).
See Paul Reed, Sartre: ‘La Nausée’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1987);
Jean Deguy, ‘La Nausée’ de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Gallimard (Foliothèque 28), 1992).
See Anthony Cheal Pugh (ed.), France 1940: Literary and Historical Reaction to Defeat (Durham: University of Durham, 1991).
See Frederick J. Harris, Encounters with Darkness: French and German Writers on World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983);
Margaret Atack, Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940–1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). On the liberation see French Cultural Studies, V, 15 (October 1994), pp. 219–300 (special issue on ‘Culture and the Liberation’);
H. R. Kedward and Nancy Wood (eds), The Liberation of France: Image and Event (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1995).
See Jacques Debû-Bridel, Les Éditions de Minuit. Historique et Bibliographie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1954).
See William Kidd, Vercors: ‘Le Silence de la mer’ et autres récits (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1991);
James W. Brown and Lawrence D. Stokes (eds), ‘The Silence of the Sea’/’Le Silence de la mer’: A Novel of French Resistance during the Second World War by ‘Vercors’ (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992).
See S. Beynon John, Saint-Exupéry: ‘Vol de nuit’ and ‘Terre des hommes’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1990).
See J. E. Flower, Roger Vailland: The Man and His Masks (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975).
See Christina Howells, Sartre’s Theory of Literature (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979);
Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Post-War France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975);
Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
Charles G. Hill, Jean-Paul Sartre: Freedom and Commitment (New York: Peter Lang, 1992);
Christina Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Andrew Dobson, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason: A Theory of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
See John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959);
Bruce Pratt, L’Évangile selon Albert Camus (Paris: José Corti, 1980);
Susan Tarrow, Exile from the Kingdom: A Political Re-reading of Albert Camus (University of Alabama Press, 1985);
Philip Thody, Albert Camus (London: Macmillan, 1989);
J. C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992);
J. McBride, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992);
Jean Guérin, Albert Camus: portrait de l’artiste en citoyen (Paris: F. Bourin, 1993);
Ray Davison (ed.), L’Étranger (London: Methuen, 1988);
Adèle King (ed.), Camus’s ‘L’Étranger’: Fifty Years On (London: Macmillan, 1992);
E. J. Hughes, Camus; ‘Le Premier homme’, ‘La Peste’ (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995).
See J. E. Flower, Pierre Courtade: The Making of a Party Scribe (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1995).
See Nicholas Hewitt, Literature and the Right in Post-War France: The Story of the ‘Hussards’ (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1996);
Christopher Lloyd, Aymé: ‘Uranus’/’La Tête des autres’ (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992).
See Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990);
Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
David Watson, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1991).
On the nouveau roman, see the important collections of essays by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Gallimard (Coll. Idées), 1963);
Nathalie Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard (Coll. Idées), 1964);
Michel Butor, Répertoire, 5 vols (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1960–75). See also
Jean Ricardou, Problèmes du nouveau roman (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967) and Le Nouveau Roman (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973); Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd’hui, 2 vols (Paris: UGE (Colloque de Cérisy), 1972);
Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman (London: Elek, 1972);
Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980);
Celia Britton, The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory, Politics (London: Macmillan, 1992).
See John Fletcher, Alain Robbe-Grillet (London: Methuen, 1983);
Raylene L. Ramsay, Robbe-Grillet and Modernity: Science, Sexuality, and Subversion (Gainsville, Tallahassee, Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1992).
See Elf Jongeneel, Michel Butor et le pacte romanesque (Paris: José Corti, 1988);
Jean Duffy, Butor: ‘La Modification’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1990).
See Valerie Minogue, Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981);
Sheila M. Bell, Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1993).
See Marcelle Marini, Territoires du féminin: avec Marguerite Duras (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977);
Micheline Tison-Braun, Marguerite Duras (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985);
Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1987);
Leslie Hill, Apocalyptic Desires (London: Routledge 1993);
David Coward, ‘Marguerite Duras’, in Michael Tilby (ed.), Beyond the Nouveau Roman (London and New York: Berg, 1990), pp. 39–63. On Moderato cantabile see
David Coward, Duras: ‘Moderato cantabile’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1981).
See Renate Günther, Duras: ‘Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein’ and ‘L’Amant’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1993).
See Claude Simon: analyse, théorie (Paris: UGE (Colloque de Cérisy), 1975); Celia Britton (ed.), Claude Simon (London and New York: Longman, 1993);
Mary Orr, Claude Simon: The Intertextual Dimension (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1993);
Alastair Duncan, Claude Simon: Adventures in Words (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
See Anthony Cheal Pugh, Simon: ‘Histoire’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1982).
See Robert M. Henkels, Robert Finget: The Novel as Quest (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1979).
See Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990);
Jill Forbes, The Cinema in France: After the New Wave (London: British Film Institute/Macmillan, 1992).
See Jacques Bens (ed.), Oulipo, 1960–1980 (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1981);
Warren F. Motte (ed.), Oulvpo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
See also Claude Simonnet, Queneau déchiffré (Paris: Julliard, 1962);
C. Sanders, Raymond Queneau (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994). On Zazie dans le métro see
Walter Redfern, Queneau: ‘Zazie dans le métro’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1980);
Michel Bigot, ‘Zazie dans le métro’ de Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard (Foliothèque, 34), 1994).
See D. Bellos, ‘Literary Quotations in Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi’, French Studies, LXI, 2 (April 1987), pp. 180–94 (p. 186). See also
Warren F. Motte, The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1984);
Claude Burgelin, Georges Perec (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988);
David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill Press, 1995).
See Serge Koster, Tournier (Paris: Veyrier, 1985);
Ariette Bouloumié, Michel Tournier: le roman mythologique (Paris: José Corti, 1988);
Colin Davis, Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988);
David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1996).
See Germaine Brée, Le Monde fabuleux de J. M. G. Le Clézio (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990);
Jean Ominus, Pour lire Le Clézio (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).
See Roland Barthes, Sollers écrivain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979); Leslie Hill, ‘Philippe Sollers and Tel Quel’, in Tilby (ed.), Beyond the Nouveau Roman, pp. 100–22;
Edmund J. Smyth (ed.), Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London: Batsford, 1991);
Malcolm Pollard, The Novels of Philippe Sollers: Narrative and the Visual (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994).
See Colin W. Nettlebeck, ‘Getting the Story Right: Narratives of World War II in Post-1968 France’, Journal of European Studies 15 (1985), pp. 77–116;
Alan Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the ‘Mode Rétro’ in Post-Gaullist France (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992).
See Colin W. Nettlebeck and Penelope Ann Hueston, Patrick Modiano: pièce d’identité (Paris: Minard, 1986);
Alan Morris, Patrick Modiano (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1996).
See Patrick Combes, La littérature et le mouvement de Mai (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984);
Keith Reader, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (London: Macmillan, 1993).
See Jean-Claude Lebrun and Claude Prévost, Nouveaux Territoires romanesques (Paris: Messidor Éditions Sociales, 1990);
Colin W. Nettlebeck, ‘The “Post-Literary” Novel: Echenoz, Pennac and Company’, French Cultural Studies, V, 14 (June 1994), pp. 113–38.
See Christopher Robinson, Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature (London: Cassell, 1995).
See Stephen Heath, ‘Night Books’, in David Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1054–60; and Nettlebeck, ‘The “Post-Literary” Novel’, pp. 117–18.
See Peter Broome and Graham Chesters, An Anthology of Modern French Poetry, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) and The Appreciation of Modern French Poetry, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
See Anne Hyde Greet, Apollinaire et le livre du peintre (Paris: Minard, 1977);
Margareth Wijk, Guillaume Apollinaire et l’Esprit Nouveau (Lund: W.K. Geerup, 1982):
Antoine Fongaro, Apollinaire poète: exégèses et discussions 1957–1987 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail-Toulouse, 1988).
See Claude Debon, Guillaume Apollinaire après ‘Alcools’. I: ‘Calligrammes’, le poète et la guerre (Paris: Minard, 1981);
Willard Bohn, Apollinaire, Visual Poetry, and Art Criticism (Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press: London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993).
See Monique Chefdor, Blaise Cendrars (Boston: Twayne, 1980).
Pierre Reverdy, En vrac (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1956), p. 139.
See Clive Scott, Reading the Rhythm: The Poetics of French Verse, 1910–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
See René Plantier, L’Univers poétique de Max Jacob (Paris: Klincksieck 1963);
Gerald Kamber, Max Jacob and the Poetics of Cubism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).
See Mary Ann Caws, La Main de Pierre Reverdy (Geneva: Droz, 1979);
Michel Collot, Horizon de Reverdy (Paris: Publications de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1981);
Andrew Rothwell, Textual Spaces: The Poetry of Pierre Reverdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989); ‘Pierre Reverdy 1889–1989’, Nottingham French Studies, 28, 2 (Autumn 1989).
See Christine M. Crow, Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), and Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
Brian Stimpson, Paul Valéry and Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
See Sarane Alexandrian, Le Surréalisme et le rêve (Paris: Gallimard, 1974);
J. H. Matthews, The Imagery of Surrealism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1977);
Marcel Jean, Autobiographie du surréalisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978);
Robert Stuart Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Octopus Books, 1980);
Keith Aspley, André Breton the Poet (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1989);
Mark Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (London: Bloomsbury, 1995).
Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, in Lautréamont: Germain Nouveau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1970), p. 225.
See Jean Yves Debreuille, Éluard ou le pouvoir du mot (Paris: Nizet, 1977);
Jean-Charles Gateau, Paul Éluard et la peinture surréaliste (Geneva: Droz, 1982); and Paul Éluard, le frère voyant (Paris: Laffont, 1988);
Clive Scott (ed.), Anthologie Éluard (London: Methuen Educational, 1983).
On Péret, see Jean-Michel Goutier, Bejamin Péret (Paris: Veyrier, 1982).
On Char, see Jean-Claude Mathieu, La Poésie de René Char, ou Le Sel de la Splendeur, vol. I: Traversée du surréalisme-, vol. II: Poésie et résistance (Paris: José Corti, 1984–5);
Michael Bishop, René Char, les dernières années (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990);
Eric Marty, René Char (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990).
See Roger Little, Saint-John Perse (London: Athlone Press, 1973);
Marie-Laure Ryan, Rituel et poésie: une lecture de Saint-John Perse (Berne: Peter Lang, 1977);
Mireille Sacotte, Saint-John Perse (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1991).
See J. A. Hiddleston, L’Univers de Jules Supervielle (Paris: José Corti, 1965);
Robert Vivier, Lire Supervielle (Paris: José Corti, 1971);
Paul Villaneix, Le Hors-venu, ou le personnage poétique de Supervielle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972);
Yves-Alain Favre, Supervielle: la Rêverie et le chant dans ‘Gravitations’ (Paris: Nizet, 1981).
See Malcolm Bowie, Henri Michaux: A Study of his Literary Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973);
Jean-Pierre Martin, Henri Michaux: Écritures de soi. Expatriations (Paris: José Corti, 1994).
See Ian Higgins (ed.), Le Parti pris des choses (London: Athlone Press, 1979) and Francis Ponge (London: Athlone Press, 1979);
Jean Pierrot, Francis Ponge (Paris: José Corti, 1993).
See Pierre Seghers (ed.), La Résistance et ses poètes, 2 vols (Paris: Marabout, 1978);
Jean Gaucheron, La Poésie, la Résistance (Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1979);
Ian Higgins (ed.), Anthology of Second World War French Poetry (London: Methuen, 1982).
See Maxwell Adereth, Aragon: The Resistance Poems (London: Grant and Cutler, 1985).
On Emmanuel, see Alain Bosquet, Pierre Emmanuel (Paris: Seghers, 1959). On the importance of Pierre Jean Jouve for Emmanuel,
see Margaret M. Callander, The Poetry of Pierre Jean Jouve (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965).
See Ian Higgins, ‘Jean Tardieu’s Oradour’, French Studies, XLVIII, 4 (October 1994), pp. 425–38.
See Claude Marie Beaujeu, L’Alexandrin dans le ‘Crève-cœur’ d’Aragon (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1993); Adareth, Aragon: The Resistance Poems, pp. 53–70; and Higgins, Anthology of Second World War French Poetry, pp. 31–44.
On post-war French poetry, see C. A. Hackett, New French Poetry. An Anthology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973);
Michael Bishop, The Contentporary Poetry of France: Eight Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985);
Michel Baude and Jeannine Baude (eds), Poesie et spiritualité en France depuis 1950 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1988);
Marie-Claire Bancquart, Poésie 1945–1960, les mots, la voix (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1989);
Richard Stamelman, Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990);
Martin Sorrell (ed. and trans.), Modern French Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (London: Forest Books, 1992). On Bonnefoy, see
John T. Naughton, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984);
Daniel Leuwers, Yves Bonnefoy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988).
See Marie-Claire Dumas (ed.), La Poésie de Philippe Jaccottet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1986).
On Deguy, see Michael Bishop, Michel Deguy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988);
Jean Moussaron and Jacques Derrida, La Poésie comme avenir. Essai sur l’œuvre de M. Deguy (Grenoble: Syllabe, 1992). On Dupin, see
Maryann De Julio, Rhetorical Landscapes: The Poetry and Art Criticism of Jacques Dupin (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1992);
E. Loze, Approaches de Jacques Dupin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993). On Guillevic, see
Gavin Bowd, Guillevic, sauvage de la modernité (Glasgow: Glasgow University French and German Publications, 1993);
Michael Brophy, Eugène Guillevic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993). On recent women’s poetry, see
Martin Sorrell (ed. and trans.), Elles. A Bilingual Anthology of Modern French Poetry by Women (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1995).
For a history of the development of film in France, see Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
Two invaluable sources for this section have been David Bradby, Modern French Drama 1940–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, rev. edn 1991), with its thorough accounts of the material practices of contemporary French theatre and the work of key directors and details of the staging of individual plays;
and David Bradby and David Williams, Directors’ Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988). See also
Geneviève Serreau, Histoire du ‘nouveau théâtre’ (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966);
John Fletcher (ed.), Forces in Modem French Drama (London: University of London Press, 1972);
Bettina L. Knapp, French Theatre, 1918–39 (London: Macmillan, 1985);
Jean Duvigneaud and Jean Lagoutte, Le Théâtre contemporain: culture et contre-culture (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1974);
Henri Béhar, Le Théâtre dada et surréaliste (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1979).
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980).
A difficult but rewarding consideration of issues appears in Jacques Derrida’s essay on Antonin Artaud, ‘La Parole Soufflée’, Tel quel, no. 20 (Winter 1965), coll. in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Differance, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
See Jean-Louis Barrault, Réflexions sur le théâtre (Paris: Jacques Vautrain, 1949), passim, for Barraulf s collaboration with Claudel. See, on
Claudel, Jacques Madaule, Le Drame de Paul Claudel (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1947);
Michel Lioure, L’Esthétique dramatique de Paul Claudel (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971).
For background see Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature (London: Constable, 1966).
See Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968);
Michel Arrivé, Les Langages de Jarry (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972);
Henri Béhar, Jarry dramaturge (Paris: Nizet, 1980).
‘Trois conférences prononcées à l’université de Mexico. I: Surréalisme et révolution’ (26 February 1936), coll. in Antonin Artaud, Messages révolutionnaires (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1971). Other pieces by Artaud referred to are collected in Le Théâtre et son double (1938).
See Sartre’s theoretical writings, coll. in Jean-Paul Sartre, Un théâtre de situations, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard, 1973);
also Robert Lorris, Sartre dramaturge (Paris: Nizet, 1975).
See Camus’s theoretical writings, coll. in Albert Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, ed. Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1962);
also Ilona Coombs, Camus, homme de théâtre (Paris: Nizet, 1968);
Edward Freeman, The Theatre of Albert Camus: A Critical Study (London: Methuen, 1971).
Georges Bataille, ‘Notes: La question coloniale. D’un caractère sacré des criminels (Genet)’, Critique no. 35 (April 1949), pp. 365–71 and 371–3; rpt. in Oeuvres complètes XI: Articles I (1944–49) (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1988), p. 469. See, on Genet, Richard N. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (London: Peter Owen, 1968);
Richard C. Webb (ed.), File on Genet (London: Methuen Drama, 1992);
Edmond White, Genet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
See Dominique Nores (ed.), Les Critiques de notre temps et Beckett (Paris: Gamier Frères, 1971);
James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979);
Ruby Cohn, fust Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980);
James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987);
Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993);
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, and New York: Simon and Shuster, 1996).
See, on Ionesco, Richard N. Coe, Ionesco: a Study of his Plays (London: Methuen, rev. edn 1971);
Emmanuel C. Jacquart, Le Théâtre de dérision: Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).
See Philippe Madral, Le Théâtre hors les murs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969);
Judith Graves Miller, Theater and Revolution in France since 1968 (Lexington: French Forum, 1977).
See Bradby and Williams, Directors’ Theatre; and Ruby Cohn, ‘Ariane Mnouchkine: Playwright of a Collective’, in Enoch Brater (ed.), Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 53–63.
See essays in Brater (ed.), Feminine Focus, especially Sue-Ellen Case, ‘From Split Subject to Split Britches’; Elin Diamond, ‘Benmussa’s Adaptations: Unauthorized Texts from Elsewhere’; Jeannette Laillou Savona, ‘In Search of a Feminist Theater: Portrait of Dora’-, and Sharon A. Willis, ‘Staging Sexual Difference: Reading, Recitation and Repetition in Duras’s Malady of Death’. Also see Celita Lamar, Our Voices, Ourselves: Women Writing for the French Theatre (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
On Cixous, see also Morag Schiach, ‘Staging History’, Chapter 4 in Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Jennifer Birkett, ‘The Limits of Language: The Theatre of Hélène Cixous’, in John Dunkley and Bill Kirton (eds), Voices in the Air: French Dramatists and the Resource of Language (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992).
A good introduction to Vinaver and Koltès is the anthology in English, David Bradby and Claude Schumacher (eds), New French Plays (London: Methuen Drama, 1989). On Vinaver, see
Anne Ubersfeld, Vinaver dramaturge (Paris: Librairie théâtrale, 1989).
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© 1997 Jennifer Birkett and James Kearns
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Birkett, J., Kearns, J. (1997). Changing Forms and Subjects. In: A Guide to French Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25758-4_9
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