Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also worked as an essayist, art critic and translator. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism.
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 after assembling his last major work, Illuminations.
The Club des Hashischins was a Parisian group dedicated to the exploration of drug-induced experiences, notably with hashish. Members included Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Honoré de Balzac, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud.
Michel Butor was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator.
French poetry is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.
19th-century French literature concerns the developments in French literature during a dynamic period in French history that saw the rise of Democracy and the fitful end of Monarchy and Empire. The period covered spans the following political regimes: Napoleon Bonaparte's Consulate (1799–1804) and Empire (1804–1814), the Restoration under Louis XVIII and Charles X (1814–1830), the July Monarchy under Louis Philippe d'Orléans (1830–1848), the Second Republic (1848–1852), the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852–1871), and the first decades of the Third Republic (1871–1940).
Literature of the 19th century refers to world literature produced during the 19th century. The range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written from (roughly) 1799 to 1900. Many of the developments in literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts and other aspects of 19th-century culture.
Parnassianism was a group of French poets that began during the positivist period of the 19th century (1860s–1890s), occurring after romanticism and prior to symbolism. The style was influenced by the author Théophile Gautier as well as by the philosophical ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Enid Mary Starkie CBE, was an Irish literary critic, known for her biographical works on French poets. She was a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and Lecturer and then Reader in the University.
Marcel Raymond was a Swiss literary critic who specialized in French literature. He is generally grouped with the so-called "Geneva School".
Pierre Jean Jouve was a French writer, novelist and poet. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. In 1966 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Poésie by the French Academy.
Linda Maria Baros is a French-language poet, translator and literary critic, one of the most powerful new voices on today's poetry scene . She lives in Paris, France.
Roger Pearson is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. His research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth century French literature and has worked particularly on Voltaire, Stendhal, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire. Pearson has also worked as a French to English translator.
The Société des gens de lettres de France is a writers' association founded in 1838 by the notable French authors Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and George Sand.
Étienne Carjat was a French journalist, caricaturist and photographer. He co-founded the magazine Le Diogène, and founded the review Le Boulevard. He is best known for his numerous portraits and caricatures of political, literary and artistic Parisian figures. His best-known work is the iconic portrait of Arthur Rimbaud which he took in October 1871. The location of much of his photography is untraceable after being sold to a Mr. Roth in 1923.
Wallace Fowlie (1908–1998) was an American writer and professor of literature. He was the James B. Duke Professor of French Literature at Duke University where he taught from 1964 to the end of his career. Although he published more than twenty books, he was devoted to teaching, particularly undergraduate courses in French, Italian, and modernist literature. He took his A.B. at Harvard College in 1930 followed by a Master's in 1933 and a Ph.D. in 1936, also at Harvard. Before coming to Duke in 1964, he taught at Bennington College, University of Chicago, and Yale University.
René Marie Galand was a writer and Professor of French. He was born in Châteauneuf-du-Faou in Brittany.
For centuries Paris has been the home and frequently the subject matter of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights in French literature, including Moliere, Voltaire, Balzac, Victor Hugo and Zola and Proust. Paris also was home to major expatriate writers from around the world, including Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Leopold Senghor, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, E. du Perron, Milan Kundera and Henry Miller. Few of the writers of Paris were actually born in Paris; they were attracted to the city first because of its university, then because it was the center of the French publishing industry, home of the major French newspapers and journals, of its important literary salons, and the company of the other writers, poets, and artists.
