Cambridge Companion to French Literature

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"In this authoritative and accessible account of French literature, sixteen essays by leading specialists offer provocative insights into French literary culture, its genres, movements, themes, and historic turning points, including the cultural and linguistic challenges of today's multi-ethnic France. The French have, over the centuries, invented and reinvented writing, from the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes to Montaigne's Essais, which gave the world a new literary form and a new standard for writing about personal thought and experience; from the highly polished tragedies of French classicism to the satirical novels of the Enlightenment; from Proust's explorations of social and sexual mores to the 'New Novel' of the late twentieth century; and from Baudelaire's urban poetry to today's poetic experiments with sound and typography. The broad scope of this Companion, which goes beyond individual authors or periods, enables a deeper appreciation for the distinctive literature of France"-- "Literature could be defined as the repertory of those texts that survive long after the moment of their composition. Of course, there are many other ways to say what literature is. Aristotle said that poetry is distinguished from history by its fictional quality, and on this view poetry is what tells of those things that could have happened rather than what actually did happen. Thus, even if history were written in verse, it would still not be poetic. The linguist Roman Jakobson, on the other hand, described the 'poetic function' by reference to the formal features of a text, independently of judgments about reality and fiction, and late twentieth century literary experimentation-including novels written for Twitter and texts that arbitrarily omit a certain letter of the alphabet-lends weight to this view. However, readers are probably not deeply concerned with such boundary disputes. And in the academic study of literature, particularly of French literature, fiction and non- fiction, prose and verse, manifestoes and slogans, aphorisms and editorials, pamphlets, emblem books, and treatises-all have found their place"--