French literature

French literature is the literature of France. It also includes literature that is written in French, even if the writer is not from France. There are countries besides France where French is also spoken. These countries include Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Senegal, Algeria, and Morocco. Works that are written in French but not from France are called Francophone literature.

History of French literature

The French language grew out of Latin. French is a Romance language, related to other languages like Spanish and Italian. French was also influenced by the Celtic and Frankish languages.

French Nobel Prize in Literature winners

The following French or French language authors have won a Nobel Prize in Literature:

• 1901 - Sully Prudhomme (The first Nobel Prize in literature)
• 1904 - Frédéric Mistral (wrote in Occitan)
• 1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgian)
• 1915 - Romain Rolland
• 1921 - Anatole France
• 1927 - Henri Bergson
• 1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
• 1947 - André Gide
• 1952 - François Mauriac
• 1957 - Albert Camus
• 1960 - Saint-John Perse
• 1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize)
• 1969 - Samuel Beckett (Irish, wrote in English and French)
• 1985 - Claude Simon
• 2000 - Gao Xingjian (writes in Chinese)

Fiction

• Middle Ages
  • anonymous - La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland)
  • Chrétien de Troyes - Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain, the Knight of the Lion), Lancelot, ou le Chevalier à la charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart)
  • various - Tristan et Iseult (Tristan and Iseult)
  • anonymous - Lancelot-Graal (Lancelot-Grail), also known as the prose Lancelot or the Vulgate Cycle
  • Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung - Roman de la Rose ("Romance of the Rose")
• 16th century
  • François Rabelais - Pantagruel, Gargantua
• 17th century
  • Madame de Lafayette - La Princesse de Clèves
• 18th century
  • Voltaire - Candide
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse
  • Denis Diderot - Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fatalist)
• 19th century
  • Stendhal - Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma)
  • Honoré de Balzac - La Comédie humaine ("The Human Comedy", a novel cycle which includes Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet)
  • Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary, Salammbô, L'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education)
  • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt - Germinie Lacerteux
  • Guy de Maupassant - Bel Ami, La Parure (The Necklace), other short stories
  • Émile Zola - Les Rougon-Macquart (a novel cycle which includes L'Assommoir, Nana and Germinal)
• 20th century
  • André Gide - Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), The Immoralist
  • Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time)
  • André Breton - Nadja
  • Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night)
  • Colette - Gigi
  • Jean Genet - Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
  • Albert Camus - L'Étranger (The Stranger)
  • Michel Butor - La Modification
  • Marguerite Yourcenar - Mémoires d'Hadrien
  • Alain Robbe-Grillet - Dans le labyrinthe
  • Georges Perec - La vie mode d'emploi
  • Robert Pinget - Passacaille

Poetry

Main page: French poetry

• Parnassian
• Romanticism
• Symbolism (arts)
• Surrealism

Theater

• Pierre Corneille - Le Cid
• Molière - Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, Dom Juan
• Jean Racine - Phèdre, Andromaque
• Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
• Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
• Edmond Rostand - Cyrano de Bergerac
• Jean Giraudoux - The Trojan War Will Not Take Place
• Jean Anouilh - Becket, Antigone
• Jean-Paul Sartre - No Exit
• Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot, Endgame
• Eugène Ionesco - The Bald Soprano, Rhinoceros
• Jean Genet - The Maids, The Blacks

Non-fiction

• Michel de Montaigne - The Essays
• Blaise Pascal - Les Pensées
• François de La Rochefoucauld - The Maxims
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, The Social Contract
• François-René de Chateaubriand - Genius of Christianity
• Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America
• Adolphe Theirs - History of the French Revolution, History of the Consulate and Empire
• Jules Michelet - Histoire de France, La Sorcière
• Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
• Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism, Being and Nothingness

Literary criticism

• Roland Barthes
• Paul Bénichou
• Jacques Derrida
• Julia Kristeva
• Jacques Lacan
• Jean-François Lyotard

French Literature Media

• 

  Paul Verlaine (far left) and Arthur Rimbaud (second to left) in an 1872 painting by Henri Fantin-Latour.

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  Samuel Beckett Walk, Paris (France). Nobel Prize 1969.

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  Seminar with Claude Simon, Cerisy (France). Nobel Prize 1985.

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  French contemporary literature workshop with Marc Avelot, Philippe Binant, Bernard Magné, Claudette Oriol-Boyer, Jean Ricardou, Cerisy (France), 1980.

Related pages

• French culture
• French art
• List of French language authors
• List of French language poets
• French science fiction
• Fantastique

Other websites

• French Language & Literature Resources at Yale University Archived 2007-04-21 at the Wayback Machine
• Littérature francophone virtuelle (ClicNet) online texts
• Athena Textes Français online texts
• ABU online texts
• French Literature at Digital Librarian Archived 2006-10-04 at the Wayback Machine
• Jean-Michel Maulpoix & Co.: Modern and contemporary french literature site maintained by prominent French poet Jean-Michel Maulpoix
• Full text of Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author"