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26 - The Novel in France Between the Wars

from Part IV - From Naturalism to the Nouveau Roman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

The two decades between the First and Second World Wars were a period of political turbulence and social and cultural change in France. Céline and André Malraux gave voice to right- and left-wing ideologies in their work, while François Mauriac and others offered a religious perspective on contemporary mores. Formal innovations came from Surrealism and modernism, and the voices of female, black and gay writers made themselves heard more boldly than ever before: André Breton, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Colette, Irène Némirovsky and René Maran were significant literary figures of the period. At the same time, cinema and radio challenged the cultural dominance of the novel, and within literature the landscape was changed by the beginnings of the bande dessinée and the burgeoning of mass-market popular fiction, including Delly’s romance novels and Georges Simenon’s crime fiction.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Cazenave, Michel, Malraux (Paris: Balland, 1985)Google Scholar
Chaitin, Gilbert D., The Enemy Within: Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar
Field, Frank, Three French Writers and the Great War: Studies in the Rise of Communism and Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)Google Scholar
Godard, Henri, Céline (Paris: Gallimard, 2011)Google Scholar
Holmes, Diana, French Women’s Writing 1848−1994 (London: Athlone, 1996)Google Scholar
McMillan, James (ed.), Modern France 1880–2002, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar
Nadeau, Maurice, Histoire du surréalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964).Google Scholar
Scott, Malcolm, The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850−1970 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989)Google Scholar
Walker, David, André Gide (London: Longman, 1996)Google Scholar

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