Insights
Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande is often approached as a tragic fishing novel, and that description is accurate without being complete. Published in 1886, the…
Victor Segalen’s travel writing occupies an unusual place in French literature. It draws on voyages through Polynesia and China, yet it resists the familiar…
Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac remains one of the most recognisable works in French theatre. First performed in Paris in 1897, the play combines romantic…
Paul Bourget’s Le Disciple is a psychological novel about the danger of treating human beings as experiments. Published in 1889, it belongs to the period when…
Tristan Corbière occupies an unusual place in nineteenth-century French literature. He is often associated with Decadence, yet his poems resist the polished…
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, published in 1884, is one of the most distinctive novels of European Decadence. Its central figure, Jean des Esseintes,…
In late nineteenth-century Paris, poetry was changing its sense of purpose. Writers who gathered around cafés, journals, theatres, and small publishing houses…
Stéphane Mallarmé occupies a singular place in French literature. His poems often seem to hover between speech and silence, offering images, sounds and…
Marie Bashkirtseff’s diaries offer an unusually immediate record of a young woman determined to become visible in the world. Written across adolescence and…
The memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne offer an unusually vivid passage through one of France’s most unsettled periods. Louise-Éléonore-Charlotte-Adélaïde…