Overview
Twentieth century French literature was deeply wrought per historical cases of a century & was besides shaped by -- & the contributor to -- the century's political, philosophic, moral, & artistic crises.

This time spans a survive decades of the Third Republic (1871-1940) (including World War I), the period of World War II (a german occupation & the Vichy Regime (1940-1944)), a tentative French government (1944-1946) the Fourth Republic (1946-1958) and a Fifth Republic (1959-). Significant historical cases for French literature include: a Dreyfus Affair; French colonialism and imperialism around Africa, a Far East (French Indochina) and a Pacific; a Algerian War of Independance (1954-1962); the significant incubation of the French Communist Party; the rise of Fascism in Europe; the cases of May 1968. For thomas more in French history, look at History of France.

Twentieth century French literature did non undergo an isolated development & reveals a influence of writers & genres from either around the world, including Walt Whitman, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Luigi Pirandello, the British & Our contries detective novel, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Bertold Brecht and many others. Successively, French literature has too got the radical impact in globe literature

Because of the originative spirit of a French literary & artistic movements at the beginning of the century, France gained the reputation of existence a necessarily destination for writers & creative person. Significant foreign writers world health organization own lived & worked within France (especially Paris) in the twentieth century include: Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Julio Cortazar, Vladimir Nabokov, Eugène Ionesco. Occasionally of the first works of the century inside French were written by foreign authors (Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett).

For Americans in a Twenties & Thirties (including the and so-supposed "Lost Generation"), part of the fascination by having France was likewise linked to freedom from either Prohibition. For African-Americans in the twentieth century (like James Baldwin), France was also extra accepting of race & permitted greater freedom (around kind, Jazz was embraced per French sooner than around a few areas in United states of america). The similar feel of freedom from either either political opression or even from intolerance (like anti-homosexual discrimination) has drawn more authors & writers to France. France has as well been other permissive withwitharound terms of censorship, & numerous crucial foreign language novels were originally published in France when existence banned in United states: Joyce's "Ulysses" (published by Sylvia Beach in Paris, 1922), Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" and William S. Burrough's "Naked Lunch" (both published by Olympia Press), and Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" (published by Obelisk Press).

From 1895 to 1914
A early years of a century (typically known as the "Belle époque") saw radical experiments in all genres & Symbolism and Naturalism underwent profound changes.

Alfred Jarry united symbolism with elements from either puppet theater & the rather proto-surrealism. A stage was futher radicalised each in a counsel of expressionism (the "théâtre de l'oeuvre" of Aurélien Lugné-Poe) and hyper-realism (a theater of André Antoine). A theatre director Jacques Copeau emphasized training an actor to become a complete human & rejected the Italian stage for something nearer to the Elizabethan model, & his vision would have a profound impact on the "Cartel" of the Twenties & Thirties (watch beneath).

Guillaume Apollinaire radicalized a Baudelairian poetic exploration of modern life inside evoking planes, the Eiffel Tower & urban barren, & he brought poetry into call for by using cubism across his "Calligrammes", the form of visual poetry. Inspried by Rimbaud, Paul Claudel used a forme of yours free! verse to choose his secret conversion to Catholicism. More poets from either this time include: Paul Valéry, Max Jacob (a key member of the class action in the area of Apollinaire), Pierre Jean Jouve (a follower of Romain Rolland's "Unanism"), Valery Larbaud (a translator of Whitman & friend to Joyce), Victor Segalen (friend to Huysmans and Claudel), Léon-Paul Fargue (studied by owning Stéphane Mallarmé, was close to Valéry & Larbaud).

In the novel, André Gide's early works, especially "L'Immoraliste" (1902), pursue a problems of freedom & sensualness that symbolism got posed; Alain Fournier's novel "le Grand Meaulnes" occurs as deeply felt portrait of the homesick past.

However radical experimentation was non appreciated by completely literary & artistic circles in the early century. Popular & bourgeois tastes were comparatively conservative. A poetic dramas of Edmond Rostand, especially "Cyrano de Bergerac" in 1897, were immensely popular at a turn of a century, when as easily the "well-made" plays & bourgeois farces of Georges Feydeau. Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget were leading authors of the period world health organization listed fiction as a ready to h& vehicle for ideas all about men and items. A tradition of the Balzac & Zola inspired roman-fleuve continued to exert a profound attraction, when within Romain Rolland's "Jean-Christophe" (1912).

Popular fiction & genre fiction at first of a century besides involved detective fiction, such as the mysteries of the creator & journalist Gaston Leroux who is creditied with a foremost "locked-room puzzle" -- "The Mystery of the Yellow Room", featuring a amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille (1908) -- & a vastly popular The Phantom of the Opera (1910).

From 1914 to 1945

A folly of the Foremost Globe War generated potentially supplementary radical tendancies. A Dada movement -- which began inside a café inside Switzerland around 1916 -- come to Paris in 1920, however by 1924 the writers around Paul Eluard, André Breton, Louis Aragon and Robert Desnos -- heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud's notion of the unconscious -- had modified dada provocation into Surrealism. Inside writing & in the ocular arts, & by applying automatic writing, creative games (prefer a cadavre exquis) & altered states (across alcohol and narcotics), a surrealists tried to reveal a workings of the unconscious. A class action championed last writers it saw when radical (Arthur Rimbaud, the Comte de Lautréamont, Baudelaire) & promoted a anti-bourgeois philosophy (particularly by using regards to sex and politics) which would late lead virtually all of the two to join the communist person. More writers associated using surrealism include: Jean Cocteau, René Crevel, Jacques Prévert, Jules Supervielle, Benjamin Péret, Philippe Soupault, Pierre Reverdy, Antonin Artaud (who revolutionized theater), Henri Michaux, René Char and Francis Ponge. a surrealist movement would prove my point to become a major click inside experimental writing & a international art globe until the 2nd Globe War. A surrealists system was particularly swell suited for poetry & theater, although Breton, Aragon & Cocteau wrote yearn prose works too, like Breton's novel "Nadja".

A results of surrealism may as well become felt among authors world health organization were non stictly speaking section of a movement, like a poet Alexis Saint-Léger Léger (world health organization wrote under the title Saint-John Perse) and Georges Bataille. A Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars was close to Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob & a creative person Chagall & Léger, & his act has similarities by using each surrealism & cublism.

A traditional novel in the early half of the century went across farther changes. Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novels -- such as "Voyage au bout de la nuit" ("Journey to the End of Night") -- utilized an ovoid, unwritten & slang-derived style to rail against a hypocrisies & moral lapses of his generation (his anti-antisemitic tracts in the Forties but lead to his condemnation for collaboration). Georges Bernanos's novels used more formal techniques (such as a "journal form") to more psychological exploration. Psychological analysis was as well central to François Mauriac's novels, although he would come to exist when seen by Sartre as representative of an obsolete fatalism. Jules Romains' 27 volume novel "Les Hommes de bonne volonté" (1932-1946), Roger Martin du Gard's eight-part novel period Les Thibault (1922-1940), & Marcel Proust's eight-part masterpiece "A la recherche du temps perdu" (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927) expanded on the roman-fleuve model. André Gide continued to experiment with a novel, & his virtually all sophisticated exploration of the restricts of the traditional novel come incurred in "The Counterfeiters", the novel on the face of it all about the writer trying to write the novel.

Theater around a Twenties & Thirties went across farther changes in the free association of theaters (known as the "Cartel") in a area of the directors & producers Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Gaston Baty and Ludmila and Georges Pitoëff. It produced works per French writers Jean Giraudoux, Jules Romains, Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre, & too of Greek & Shakespearian theater, and works by Luigi Pirandello, Anton Chekov and George Bernard Shaw.

In the late 1930's, the works of Hemingway, Faulkner & Dos Passos come to exist as translated into French, & their prose style got a profound impact on the act of writers prefer Jean Paul Sartre, André Malraux and Albert Camus. Sartre, Camus, Malraux & Simone De Beauvoir (who is besides famed when one of a forerunners of Feminist writing) are typically known as "existenialist writers", the information to Sartre's philosophy of Existentialism (although Camus refused to title "existentialist"). Sartre's theater, novels & short stories typically indicate people forced to look at their freedom or even doomed for their refusal to work. Malraux's novels of Spain & China when you took a civil wars look at single action using historical forces. Similar issues pop up in the novels of Henri Troyat.

A 1930's & Forties saw important contributions by citizens of French colonies & Aimé Césaire, along with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas created the literary review "L'Étudiant Noir" which was the forerunner of the Négritude movement.

Literature after World War II
the Fifties & Sixties were extremely turbulent days inside France: despite a dynamic economy ("les trentes glorieuses" or "30 Glorious Years"), a united states was torn by their compound heritage (Vietnam and Indochina, Algeria), by their collective sense of guilt from either a Vichy Regime, by their desire for renewed national prestigiousness (Gaullism), & by conservativist social tendancies within education and industry.

Elysian per theatrical experiments in a early half of the century & per horrors of the war, the and so-alleged avant-garde Paisian theater, "New Theater" or even "Theater of the Absurd" around the writers Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal refused simple explanations & abandoned traditional characters, plots & staging. More experiments inside theatre required decentralization, regional theater, "popular theater" (designed to bring working classes to the theater), & theater heavy influenced by Bertold Brecht (largely unknown in France prior to 1954), & a productions of Arthur Adamov and Roger Planchon. A Avignon festival was started within 1947 by Jean Vilar who was also crucial in the creation of the T.North.P. or even "Théâtre national popluaire".

the French novel from either a Fifties in went though a similar experimentation in the class action of writers published by "Les Éditions de Minuit", a French publisher; this "Nouveau roman" ("new novel"), associated by owning Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Michel Butor, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, also abandoned traditional plot, voice, characters & psychological science. To a certainside degree, these developments closely paralleled changes in cinema in the equivalent period of time (the Nouvelle Vague).

A writers Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Roubaud are associated with a originative movement Oulipo (founded in 1960) which utilizes elaborate mathematical strategies & constraints (like lipograms and palindromes) as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration.

Poetry around post-war time followed usually ii separate paths, 1 resulting surrealism (like sustaining René Char, Francis Ponge), and 1 -- especially concentrated in a read "L'Ephémère" -- etymologizing from either either philosophic & phenomenological concerns stemming from Heidegger, existentialism, & from either Stéphane Mallarmé's notions of the limits of language. An additional significant influence was a German poet Paul Celan. These poets include Yves Bonnefoy, André Du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin, Philippe Jaccottet, Marcelin Pleynet, Roger Giroux, Anne-Marie Albiach, Emmanuel Hocquard, Jean Daive. Numerous one ideas come besides key to the short novels of Maurice Blanchot.

A cases of May 1968 marked the watershed inside the development of a radical ideology of radical vary in education, class, personal & literature. Within theater, a conception of "création collective" developed by Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil refused division into writers, actors & producers: a goal was for number collaboration, for multiple points of see, for an elimination of separation between actors & a public, & for the audience to search out their have truth.

A first view of the post-1968 time -- "Tel Quel" -- is associated with a writers Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, the critics Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette and the philosophers Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan.

from either either a Sixties inside, numerous of the virtually all daring experiements inside French literature stand came from writers born in French overseas departments or even previous colonies. This Francophone literature includes the prize winning novels of Tahar ben Jelloun (Morroco), Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), Amin Maalouf (Lebanon) and Assia Djebar (Algeria).