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Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Liberté Additional Reading Ideas

Here's a list I compiled for the CHS class last month, of a ton of 19th Century French books for possible further reading. Students chose one book to read and write a critical analysis on (they're doing that now). I post it here just in case anybody's looking for further reading (as if there's not enough material in the Reader already, right? There are all available in English in some form, but some are harder to get hold of than others.

LITERATURE

Early Romanticism (1800-1830)
René de Chateaubriand:
    Atala (novel)
    The Genius of Christianity (social theory)
Alphonse Lamartine, Poetic Meditations (poetry)
Mme. De Staël, On Germany (criticism)
Stendhal, Racine and Shakespeare (criticism)

Popular Romanticism (1825-1880)
Jean-Pierre Béranger, 100 Poems of Béranger (political poetry)
Auguste Barbier, Two Gifts (poems?)
Hector Berlioz, Evenings with the Orchestra (essays and stories on music)
Alexandre Dumas & Auguste Maquet:
    The Three Musketeers (adventure novel)
    The Man in the Iron Mask (historical fiction)
    The Count of Monte Cristo (historical adventure)
Victor Hugo:
    Selected Poems of Victor Hugo
    Notre-Dame of Paris (Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
    Les Miserables
    Things Seen (essays from newspapers)
    Napoleon the Little (political poetry)
Alfred de Musset, Selected Works (poetry, comedic plays)
Charles Sainte-Beuve, Literary Criticism
George Sand:
    Indiana (novel)
    Leone Leoni (novel)
    Mauprat (adventure novel)
    Black City (socialist feminist novel)
    Laura: A Journey Into the Crystal (fantasy novel)
    The Naiad (ghost story)

Eugene Sue:
    The Wandering Jew (Gothic-Conspiracy Melodrama)
    The Mysteries of Paris (Crime Thriller/Mystery)

Romanticist Theater (1827-1850)
Alexandre Dumas:
    The Three Musketeers (play version)
    The Princess of Baghdad
Arséne Houssaye, Man About Paris (Memoirs of theatre director)
Victor Hugo:
    Cromwell
    Hernani
    The King’s Diversion
    Ruy Blas
Alfred de Vigny, Chatterton

Orientalist Romanticism (1820-1870)
Gustave Flaubert:
    The Temptation of Saint Anthony (novel)
    Salambo (novel)
Théophile Gautier, Romance of a Mummy (historical fiction)
Literary Travel Diaries by Gautier and Nerval

Gothic Horror / Frenetic Romanticism
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques (aristocratic horror)
Victor Hugo: 
    Han of Iceland (novel)
    Bug-Jargal (novel)
Théophile Gautier:
    Albertus: or, the Soul in Sin (gothic poem)
    The Comedy of Death (gothic poem)
Lautréamont / Isadore Ducasse:
    Maldoror (avant-garde horror-prose poem-novel)
    Poesies (poem/treatise of plaigerized quotations)
Jules Janin, The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman
Charles Nodier:
    Smarra & Trilby (gothic novels)
    The Vampyre (play adaptation of English gothic novel)

Avant-Garde Romanticism, Jeunes-France / Bouzingo (1830-1840)
Théophile Gautier:
    Three Chapters from The Jeunes-France (short stories on the avant-garde)
Gérard de Nerval:
    Selected Writings (poems, prose poems, novels)
    Sylvie (pastoral novel)
    Emilie (military historical novel)
    Aurelia (mystical novel on madness)

Realism (1830-1900)
Honoré de Balzac, The Human Comedy (cycle of novels)
Gustave Flaubert:
    Madame Bovary (novel)
    A Sentimental Education (novel)
Stendhal:
    The Red and the Black (novel)
    The Charterhouse of Parma (novel)
    Memoirs of Egoism (published diary)

Parnassians and “The Damned Poets” (1840-1880)
Charles Baudelaire:
    Flowers of Evil (dark lyric poetry)
    Paris Spleen (prose-poetry)
    Artificial Paradises (essays on art, literature & altered states)
    Selected Writings on Art and Literature (criticism & theory)
    Selected Letters
    Intimate Journals
Théophile Gautier:
    Mlle. De Maupin (novel on gender)
    Spirite (love story about a ghost)
    Enamels and Cameos (poetry)
    French Poetry Since 1830 (criticism)
Arthur Rimbaud:
    Illuminations (prose poems)
    A Season in Hell (poetry)
Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems

Genre Fiction (1850- )
Alexandre Dumas, Celebrated Crimes (true crime)
Maurice Leblanc, Arsene Lupin (mystery series)
Jules Verne:
    20,000 Leagues under the Sea (Science Fiction)
    Around the World in 80 Days (Adventure)
    Journey to the Center of the Earth (Science Fiction)
    Paris in the 20th Century (Dystopian Science Fiction)

Naturalism (1860-1900)
Colette (Many books in translation, on women in various social roles)
Guy de Maupassant, Short Stories (mostly military fiction)
Emile Zola, Germinal & other novels

Decadence and Symbolism (1880-1910)
Alphonse Allais, World of Alphonse Allais (avant-garde comic poetry)
Charles Cros, The Supreme Progress (science fiction stories)
Eduard Dujardin, We’ll To the Woods No More (first stream-of-consciousness novel)
Felix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines (poems arranged from newspaper clippings)
Adoré Floupette, Deliquescences (poems satirizing Decadent movement)
Remy de Gourmont:
    Selected Writings (philosophy, theory, and criticism)
    ed., The Book of Masks (anthology of stories & poems by many Decadent writers)
Joris-Karl Huysmans:
    Against Nature/Against the Grain (novel & criticism)
    La-Bas (novel on avant-garde satanism)
Alfred Jarry:
    Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (comic-philosophical novel)
    Ubu Roi (absurdist play)
    Days and Nights (novel)
    Black Minutes of Memorial Sand (poetry)
Marcel Schwob, The Children’s Crusade (prose-poem cycle)
Maurice Maeterlink (Belgian playwright)
Stéphane Mallarmé:
    Collected Poems
    Divigations (literary theory and philosophy)
    Collected Letters
Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden (horror stories)
Rachilde, Monsieur Venus (novel on gender-play)
Georges Rodenbach, Bruges la Morte (novel)
Saint-Pol-Roux, Pauses in the Procession (prose poems)
Paul Valéry:
    The Art of Poetry (literary theory and philosophy)
    Monsieur Teste (novel)
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam:
    The Future Eve (avant-garde science fiction)
    Cruel Tales (satirical prose poems)

NONFICTION

Philosophy, Social and Political Theory (1800-1900)
Henri Bergson (very dense philosophy):
    Matter and Memory
    Time and Simultaneity
    Time and Free Will
Pierre Brisset, The True Philosophy (avant-garde anthropology)
Charles Fourier, Theory of the Four movements (utopian theory, sometimes absurd)
Claire Moses and Leslie Rabine, ed., Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (translations and history)
Madame de Staël, Politics, Literature, and National Character (social and literary theory)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Flora Tristan:
    The Worker’s Union
    Peregrinations of a Pariah (autobiography of feminist labor organiser)

History and Historiography (1820-1880)
Jules Claretie, Camille Desmoulins, Lucille Desmoulins (biography of Dantonist journalists)
Théophile Gautier, A History of Romanticism (Eyewitness account of Romanticist avant-garde)
François Guizot, History and Origin of Representative Government in Europe
Paul Lacroix (Bibliophile Jacob), France in the Middle Ages (Romanticist history of Medieval life)
Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Revolution of 1871 (history of the Commune by a participant)
Claude-François Meneval, Working with Napoleon (memoirs of Napoleon’s secretary)
Henri Murger, Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (short stories on Bohemian subculture)
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon on Napoleon (autobiography)


Some poets and short story writers have never had an entire book published in English, but some work can be found in various anthologies and online. If you’re interested in one or more of these people, let us know and we might be able to help you find enough of their work to write about.

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