The Full Wiki



More info on Portal:French literature

Portal:French literature: Wikis


Note: Many of our articles have direct quotes from sources you can cite, within the Wikipedia article! This article doesn't yet, but we're working on it! See more info or our list of citable articles.

Encyclopedia

Updated live from Wikipedia, last check: June 04, 2012 06:24 UTC (48 seconds ago)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia portals: Culture · Geography · Health · History · Mathematics · Natural sciences · Philosophy · Religion · Society · Technology

Welcome to the French and Francophone Literary Portal

Open book nae French flag.png
French literature is literature written by citizens of France. Though most French literature is written in French, it may be written in other traditional languages.

French literature has a long history. Early works were written mostly in the Occitan language or one of the Oïl languages. Though literature declined during the Hundred Years War, it was revived during the French Renaissance of the sixteenth century. During the eighteenth century, French became the lingua franca of Western Europe and French literature grew to have a profound impact on and be profoundly impacted by the literature of other countries.

Map-Francophone World.png
(Countries where French is prominent)

Francophone literature is literature written in the French language. Most is written in countries that are part of La Francophonie, though there are acclaimed French authors from other countries.

Categories

Selected article

The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of Belgian comic books created by Belgian artist Hergé, the pen name of Georges Remi (1907–1983). Remi's pen name Hergé came from transposing his initials "R-G", which sounds like "Hergé" in French). The series first appeared in French in a children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle on January 10, 1929. Set in a painstakingly researched world closely mirroring our own, The Adventures of Tintin presents a number of characters in distinctive settings. The series has continued as a favourite of readers and critics alike for over 70 years.

The hero of the series is the eponymous character, Tintin, a young Belgian reporter and traveller. He is aided in his adventures from the beginning by his faithful dog Snowy (Milou in French). Later, popular additions to the cast included Captain Haddock and other colourful supporting characters.

The success of the series saw the serialised strips collected into a series of albums (23 in all), spun into a successful magazine and adapted for both film and theatre. The series is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, with translations published in over 50 languages and more than 200 million copies of the books sold to date.

The comic strip series has long been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ligne claire style. Engaging, well-researched plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy; mysteries; political thrillers; and science fiction. The stories within the Tintin series always feature slapstick humour, offset in later albums by sophisticated satire and political/cultural commentary.

Selected picture

Nicolas Chorier Académie des Dames.jpg

Title page of the 1757 Latin edition of the erotic dialogue, The School of Women, published in French as L'Académie des dames and written by Nicolas Chorier, which was written during the seventeenth century. It included scenes of tribadism, group sex, and vaginal intercourse and was one of the earliest works of erotic literature.

Quotes

  • "Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true."
Honoré de Balzac
  • "The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult."
Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand
  • "God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man…The first is named Nature, the second is named Art."
Victor Hugo
  • "Almost everything is imitation… The most original writers borrowed from one another."
Voltaire

Selected biography

Moliere 12.jpg
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, also known by his stage name, Molière (January 15, 1622February 17, 1673) was a French playwright and actor who is considered one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. Among Molière's best-known dramas are Le Misanthrope, (The Misanthrope), L'École des femmes (The School for Wives), Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur, (Tartuffe or the Hypocrite), L'Avare ou l'École du mensonge (The Miser), and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman).

From a prosperous family and having studied at the Jesuit Clermont College (now Lycée Louis-le-Grand), Molière left with a good education to begin a life in the theater. Thirteen years on the road as an actor helped him to polish his comic abilities while he also began writing, combining Commedia dell'Arte elements with the more refined French comedy.

Through the patronage of a few aristocrats including the brother of Louis XIV, Molière procured a command performance before the King at the Louvre. Performing a classic play by Pierre Corneille and a farce of his own, Le Docteur amoureux (The Doctor in Love), Molière was granted the use of Salle du Petit-Bourbon at the Louvre, a spacious room appointed for theatrical performances. Later, Molière was granted the use of the Palais-Royal, in both locations he found success among the Parisians with plays such as Les Précieuses ridicules (The Affected Ladies), L'École des maris (The School for Husbands) and L'École des femmes (The School for Wives). This royal favour brought a royal pension to his troupe and the title "Troupe du Roi" (The King's Troupe). Molière continued as the official author of court entertainments.

Though he received the adulation of the court and Parisians, Molière's satires attracted criticisms from moralists and the Church. Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur (Tartuffe or the Hypocrite) and its attack on religious hypocrisy roundly received condemnations from the Church while Don Juan was banned from performance. Molière's hard work in so many theatrical capacities began to take its toll and by 1667, he had to take a break from the stage. In 1673, during a production of his final play, Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), Molière, who suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, was seized by a coughing fit and a haemorhage while playing the hypochondriac Argan. He finished the performance but collapsed again and died a few hours later. In his time in Paris, Molière had completely reformed French comedy.

Things you can do

Clipboard.svg
Here are some Open Tasks :

Topics

French literatureFrancophone literatureFrench novelsFrench poemsFrench theatre
History:
Medieval French literatureFrench Renaissance literatureFrench literature of the 17th centuryFrench literature of the 18th centuryFrench literature of the 19th centuryFrench literature of the 20th centuryContemporary French literature
Country:
FranceBelgiumCanada (French Canadian writers from outside QuebecQuebec) • Haiti • Luxembourg • SwitzerlandPostcolonial literature
Movements:
NaturalismSymbolismSurrealismExistentialismNouveau romanTheatre of the Absurd
Genres:
Comics • Detective fiction • FantastiquePoetryScience fiction
Writers:
DramatistsEssayistsNovelistsPoets
Other:
French languageOther languagesCriticsAwards

Related portals

WikiProjects

Wikipedia:WikiProject Books
Wikipedia:WikiProject France
Literary WikiProject
French WikiProject
What are portals? · List of portals · Featured portals

Purge server cache


Source material

Up to date as of January 22, 2010

From Wikisource

Castle of Sully

Portal French Literature

Édouard Manet:Painting

French authors

Middle Ages

Chrétien de Troyes ~ Guillaume de Lorris ~ Marie de France ~ Moniot d'Arras ~ Rutebeuf ~ François Villon

16th century

Joachim du Bellay ~ Louise Labé ~ La Boétie ~ Marguerite de Navarre ~ Clément Marot ~ Michel de Montaigne ~ François Rabelais ~ Pierre de Ronsard ~ Jean de Sponde

17th century

Nicolas Boileau ~ Bossuet ~ Corneille ~ Cyrano de Bergerac ~ Fénelon ~ La Bruyère ~ Madame de La Fayette ~ Jean de La Fontaine ~ La Rochefoucauld ~ Molière ~ Blaise Pascal ~ Charles Perrault ~ Jean Racine ~ Saint-Amant ~ Madame de Sévigné

18th century :

Beaumarchais ~ Jacques Cazotte ~ Denis Diderot ~ Pierre Choderlos de Laclos ~ Alain-René Lesage ~ Marivaux ~ Montesquieu ~ Rétif de la Bretonne ~ Cardinal de Retz ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau ~ Sade ~ Voltaire

19th century

Balzac ~ Barbey d'Aurevilly ~ Charles Baudelaire ~ Chateaubriand ~ Benjamin Constant ~ Alphonse Daudet ~ Alexandre Dumas ~ Émile Erckmann ~ Gustave Flaubert ~ Théophile Gautier ~ Goncourt brothers ~ José-Maria de Heredia ~ Victor Hugo ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans ~ Alphonse de Lamartine ~ Lautréamont ~ Stéphane Mallarmé ~ Guy de Maupassant ~ Prosper Mérimée ~ Alfred de Musset ~ Gérard de Nerval ~ Jules Renard ~ Arthur Rimbaud ~ George Sand ~ Madame de Staël ~ Stendhal ~ Jules Vallès ~ Paul Verlaine ~ Jules Verne ~ Alfred de Vigny ~ Villiers de l'Isle-Adam ~ Émile Zola

20th century

Alain-Fournier ~ Guillaume Apollinaire ~ Antonin Artaud ~ Henri Barbusse ~ André Gide ~ Francis Jammes ~ Maurice Leblanc ~ Gaston Leroux ~ Albert Londres ~ Louis Pergaud ~ Marcel Proust ~ Raymond Radiguet

Plays


Middle Ages

  • La Farce de Maistre Pathelin


17th century

Honoré Daumier 003.jpg

Molière

Corneille

Racine


20th century

Edmond Rostand

  • Cyrano de Bergerac

Alfred Jarry

  • Ubu-Roi

Poetry

Aveu René 4.jpg

Old French / Middle Ages

The Song of Roland ~ Le Roman de Renart ~ Romance of the Rose ~ Tristan and Iseult

Renaissance

- Marot: L'Adolescence clémentine - Various Blasons du corps féminin ~ Psaumes - Scève: Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu - Pernette du Guillet: Rimes - Du Bellay: L'Olive ~ Défense et illustration de la langue française - Ronsard: Odes ~ Les Amours - Louise Labé: Works - Du Bellay: Antiquités de Rome ~ Regrets

- Philippe Desportes - Agrippa d'Aubigné - La Boétie: Twenty-nine Sonnets - Sponde: Poèmes chrétiens

17th century

Malherbe: Odes - Sonnets - Chansons - Stances ~ Racan : Bergeries

Régnier: Satires Théophile de Viau: Odes - Élégies - Satires - Pyrame et Thisbé ~ Honoré d'Urfé ~ Jean Ogier de Gombaud ~ Régnier, nephew of Desportes ~ Maynard ~ Théophile de Viau ~ Boisrobert ~ Saint-Amant ~ Chapelain ~ Voiture ~ Tristan L'Hermite ~ Corneille ~ Scarron ~ Benserade ~ Brébeuf ~ La Fontaine ~ Boileau ~ Racine ~ Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu ~ Regnard

18th century

19th century

The Drunken Boat ~ The Flowers of Evil ~ The Lay of Maldoror ~ La Légende des Siècles ~ Dieu ~ Méditations poétiques ~ Poèmes saturniens ~

20th century

Non fiction

Encyclopedie cover page.jpg

16th century

Michel de Montaigne

17th century

Blaise Pascal

François de La Rochefoucauld

  • The Maxims

18th century

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

19th century

François-René de Chateaubriand

  • Genius of Christianity

Alexis de Tocqueville

Adolphe Thiers

  • History of the French Revolution,
  • History of the Consulate and Empire

Jules Michelet

  • Histoire de France,

20th century

André Breton

Fiction

Middle Ages

anonymous - The Song of Roland ~ Chrétien de Troyes - Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart ~ various - The Romance of Tristan and Iseult ~ anonymous - Lancelot-Grail), also known as the prose Lancelot or the Vulgate Cycle ~ Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung - Romance of the Rose

Renaissance

François Rabelais - Pantagruel, Gargantua

17th century :

Madame de La Fayette - La Princesse de Clèves

18th century :

Voltaire - Candide Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse Denis Diderot - Jacques the Fatalist

19th century

Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables ~ Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo ~ Stendhal: The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma ~ Honoré de Balzac: The Human Comedy, a novel cycle which includes Père Goriot) ~
20000 squid Nautilus viewbay.jpg
Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ~ Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education ~ Guy de Maupassant: Bel Ami, The Necklace, other short stories ~ Émile Zola: Les Rougon-Macquart (a novel cycle which includes Germinal, Nana and La Bête humaine)

20th century

Alcools ~ Arsène Lupin ~ The Phantom of the Opera ~ Remembrance of Things Past ~

Wikisource translations








Got something to say? Make a comment.
Your name
Your email address
Message
Please enter the solution to case below
45-15=