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20th-century French Literature
20th-century French literature is literature written in French from 1900 to 1999. For literature made after 1999, see the article Contemporary French literature. Many of the developments in French literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts. For more on this, see French art of the 20th century. Overview French literature was profoundly shaped by the historical events of the century and was also shaped by—and a contributor to—the century's political, philosophical, moral, and artistic crises. This period spans the last decades of the Third Republic (1871–1940) (including World War I), the period of World War II (the German occupation and the Vichy–1944), the provisional French government (1944–1946) the Fourth Republic (1946–1958) and the Fifth Republic (1959-). Important historical events for French literature include: the Dreyfus Affair; French colonialism and imperialism in Africa, the Far East (French Indochina) and the Pacific; the Alge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contemporary French Literature
This article is about French literature from the year 2000 to the present day. Overview The economic, political and social crises of contemporary France -terrorism, violence, immigration, unemployment, racism, etc.—and (for some) the notion that France has lost its sense of identity and international prestige—through the rise of American hegemony, the growth of Europe and of global capitalism (french: mondialisation)—have created what some critics (like Nancy Huston) have seen as a new form of detached nihilism, reminiscent of the 50s and 60s ( Beckett, Cioran). The best known of these authors is Michel Houellebecq, whose ''Atomised'' (french: Les particules élémentaires) was a major international phenomenon. These tendencies have also come under attack. In one of her essays, Nancy Huston criticises Houellebecq for his nihilism; she also makes an acerbic censure of his novels in her work ''The teachers of despair'' (french: Professeurs de désespoir). Although the con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello (; 28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd. Biography Early life Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in an area called "Caos" ("Chaos" in Italian, but in Sicilian dialect lit. "Trouser", from the shape of a nearby ravine), near Porto Empedocle, a poor suburb of Girgenti (Agrigento, a town in southern Sicily). His father, Stefano, belonged to a wealthy family involved in the sulphur industry, and his mother, Caterina Ricci Gramitto, was also of a well-to-do background, descending from a family of the bourgeois prof ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (; born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and interior designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, for her novel ''The Age of Innocence''. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are ''The House of Mirth'' and the novella ''Ethan Frome''. Biography Early life Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862 to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street in New York City. To her friends and family she was known as "Pussy Jones". She had two older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. Frederic married Mary Cadwalader Rawle; their daughter was landscape archite ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland. From 1948 to 1959, Nabokov was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University. Nabokov's 1955 novel '' Lolita'' ranked fourth on Modern Library's list of the 100 best 20th-century novels in 2007 and is considered one of the greatest 20th-century works of literature. Nabokov's ''Pale Fire'', published in 1962, was ranked ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julio Cortázar
Julio Florencio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984; ) was an Argentine, nationalized French novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe. He is considered one of the most innovative and original authors of his time, a master of history, poetic prose and short story in general and a creator of important novels that inaugurated a new way of making literature in the Hispanic world by breaking the classical moulds through narratives that escaped temporal linearity. He lived his childhood and adolescence and incipient maturity in Argentina and, after the 1950s, in Europe. He lived in Italy, Spain, and in Switzerland. In 1951, he settled in France for more than three decades and composed some of his works there. Early life Julio Cortázar was born on 26 August 1914, in Ixelles,Cortázar sin barba, by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. It became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anaïs Nin
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (February 11, 1903 – January 14, 1977; , ) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris (1924–1940), and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an established author. Nin wrote journals prolifically from age eleven until her death. Her journals, many of which were published during her lifetime, detail her private thoughts and personal relationships. Her journals also describe her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller, both of whom profoundly influenced Nin and her writing. In addition to her journals, Nin wrote several ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist. He broke with existing literary forms and developed a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, Surrealism, surrealist free association (psychology), free association, and mysticism. His most characteristic works of this kind are ''Tropic of Cancer (novel), Tropic of Cancer'', ''Black Spring (novel), Black Spring'', ''Tropic of Capricorn (novel), Tropic of Capricorn'', and the trilogy ''The Rosy Crucifixion'', which are based on his experiences in New York City, New York and Paris (all of which were banned in the United States until 1961). He also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism, and painted watercolors. Early life Miller was born at his family's home, 450 East 85th Street, in the Yorkville, Manhattan, Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City. He was the son o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William S
William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of England in 1066,All Things William"Meaning & Origin of the Name"/ref> and remained so throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era. It is sometimes abbreviated "Wm." Shortened familiar versions in English include Will, Wills, Willy, Willie, Bill, and Billy. A common Irish form is Liam. Scottish diminutives include Wull, Willie or Wullie (as in Oor Wullie or the play ''Douglas''). Female forms are Willa, Willemina, Wilma and Wilhelmina. Etymology William is related to the given name ''Wilhelm'' (cf. Proto-Germanic ᚹᛁᛚᛃᚨᚺᛖᛚᛗᚨᛉ, ''*Wiljahelmaz'' > German ''Wilhelm'' and Old Norse ᚢᛁᛚᛋᛅᚼᛅᛚᛘᛅᛋ, ''Vilhjálmr''). By regular sound changes, the native, inherited English form of the name shoul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.BBC Culture:Cath Pound. July 26, 2021. The shocking memoir of the 'lost generation'. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210726-the-scandalous-memoir-of-the-lost-generation In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, ''The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas'', written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel ''The Picture of Dorian Gray'', and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46. Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, Wilde read Literae Humaniores#Greats, Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional Classics, classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote ''The Threepenny Opera'' with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic ''Lehrstücke'' and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the . During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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