Please note that the division into French and Francophone literatures is often artificial, but also necessary on a long page.
 Anna de Noailles' manuscript poem "Offrande" (click the image to read the verse) |
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French Literature and culture
Greatsong.net -- more than 2 million songs, lyrics of 500.000 French songs both old and contemporary, 50,000 translations (English/French) - Voyage en Orient -- Orientalism in texts and pictures at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
- When you next travel to France, be sure to visit homes of famous writers
- La Petite Bibliothèque ADPF -- the most useful (though short) site on major French writers, with biographies and bibliographies
- CuriosaDoc -- a site with engravings and texts of the 19th century
- Histoires littéraires -- a journal site with literary biographies and bibliographies
- Hubert de Phalèse, littérature et informatique -- literary studies, with many texts online (highly recommended)
- WebLettres -- a site on teaching literature
- Bibliothèque Clio on travel literature
- The Joseph Sablé collection on 19th-century French literature, and on women authors
- alalettre -- a full literary site, with many authors represented
- Dix-Neuf -- a list of resources on 19th-century French culture and literature
- Rubriques à bac -- another site on the Bac français (some free articles, but this is a paying site)
- List of French (and other) authors, provided by the Encyclopaedia Universalis
- Athéna Textes Français -- a comprehensive literary site, with links to full texts online
- Gallica -- a site at the Bibliothèque Nationale with over 80,000 full texts online (not all literary)
- Livresse.com -- a site devoted to books in French (mostly contemporary)
- Un siècle d'écrivains -- France 3 TV series on 20th-century French authors (site is now incomplete)
- Literary works at La Bibliothèque électronique de Lisieux
- French texts at UVA's Electronic Text Center (not all available for consultation from outside UVA)
- ABU, Association des Bibliophiles Universels, offers many full texts
- The Oxford Text Archive -- over 2,500 texts in 25 languages
- LittératureS et CompagnieS -- a French literary site, listing other sites and many authors
- ClicNet: Littérature francophone virtuelle -- Swarthmore's literary site, with a search engine and a dictionary (hear the words, too)
- Search no further, Tennessee Bob's Famous French Links Supersite has it all
- The most comprehensive site on French poetry, offering more than 6000 poems!
- A comprehensive site on French poetry, offered by Le Club des poètes
- Another site on French poetry
- Le printemps des poètes -- contemporary poetry, with audio files and images as well as text
- La Poésie que j'aime -- a personal site on poets and poetry
- Les Saucissons chauds -- an award-winning site on French culture and literature
- French literary journals online at CUNY
- A useful lexicon of French literary terms
- La Clé -- a tool for literary analysis, offered by the Université du Québec, Montréal
- FABULA -- a sophisticated site on the theory of literary fiction, with multiple links
- Exigence Littérature -- a site on literary criticism
- Le Magazine littéraire, with a search engine for archived materials, offering links as well
- Théâtrales -- a comprehensive site on French theater, at the Université du Québec, Montréal
- Spectacles du Grand Siècle -- a site on French theater from the 16th to the 18th century
- Magister, travaux dirigés de français -- the French literature program for the Bac
- Eighteenth-Century Resources, from Rutgers University
- Nineteenth-Century Resources, from the University of Bristol
- Grands Auteurs romantiques du XIXe siècle -- a personal site, with biographies and analyses
- La Création au féminin -- a list of women writers, with an attempt to define women's creativity
- A Celebration of Women Writers: France -- University of Pennsylvania
- The International Dada Archive
- Centre de recherche sur le Surréalisme
- Over 10,000 literary quotations compiled by an avid reader
- Women of the Left Bank -- US expatriates living in early 20th-century Paris
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French Authors
(a minimal list, in chronological order, privileging the modern period!)
click on the links: 16th century -- 17th -- 18th -- 19th -- 20th-21st
1. Sixteenth Century
- Take a long, winding, and oh so pleasant stroll in the company of Montaigne, arguably the first modern writer
2. Seventeenth Century
- L'Astrée, a site comparing two rare editions of the first part of this famous work
- Madame de La Fayette, author of the first European novel, La Princesse de Clèves
- Jacques
Bénigne Bossuet, seventeenth-century preacher at the king's court and unbeatable stylist
- The Académie française page on Bossuet
- An exhaustive site on Molière
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3. Eighteenth Century
- Françoise de Graffigny, author of Lettres d'une Péruvienne
- Voltaire, philosopher and satirical novelist
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believer in human goodness, author of Les Confessions and L'Origine de l'inégalité
- The infamous Marquis de Sade
- René de Chateaubriand, writer and diplomat, who coined the phrase "le vague des passions"
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4. Nineteenth Century
- Works by the Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine
- Exhaustive page on novelist George Sand (born Aurore Dudevant), with multiple links
- Alfred
de Musset, Romantic poet, novelist, and playwright
- Musset's tempestuous relationship with Sand as recounted in the movie Les Enfants du siècle (1999)
- Stendhal (Henri Beyle), high-speed novelist, author of La Chartreuse de Parme
- The Victor Hugo website (in English)
- Hugo at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
- Eugène
Fromentin, painter and writer
- page listing museum exhibits of Fromentin's paintings
- Gérard de Nerval, poet and author of the visionary narrative Aurélia
- Théophile Gautier, poet and critic
- A site on the first modernist poet, Charles Baudelaire
- The poet Théodore de Banville
- Alexandre Dumas, author of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (special 2002 exhibit)
- The Université de Rouen's site on novelist Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary
- Site on Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen, released among a series of French cultural "Celebrations"
- A site devoted to the Decadent poet Jules Laforgue
- Maupassant, famous for his short stories (complete stories online at this site!)
- Pierre
Loti, world traveler
- Biography of Pierre Loti in English
- Article on the Orient of Pierre Loti
- Pierre Loti at the French Academy
- Err on the poetic side with Arthur Rimbaud
- Decadent, gothic novelist Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
- The musical poet Paul Verlaine
- The Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé
- Émile
Zola on AIZEN, Association Internationale Zola et le Naturalisme
- Detailed personal site on Zola, with links
- A site leading to the complete text of A rebours, by J.K. Huysmans
- Lautréamont -- a site devoted to the creator of the wild Chants de Maldoror
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5. Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries (see the page on Francophone writers for names like Renée Vivien)
- Discover the "classical
modernist" poet, essayist, and critic Paul
Valéry at the Académie Français
- A few words on Paul Valéry by Michel Décaudin
- Alain-Fournier,
writer of the unforgettable novel Le Grand Meaulnes
- A biography of Alain-Fournier
- Novelist and essayist André Gide
- André
Gide Org -- online center for Gidian studies
- Gidiana Net -- successor to the Atelier André Gide
- Gide and la Nouvelle Revue Française
- Comprehensive site on
novelist Marcel
Proust and his monumental A la recherche du temps perdu
- Proust, l'écriture et les arts -- from the 1999 exhibit at the Bibliothèque Nationale
- Tempsperdu.com -- a site (in English) devoted to Proust, with useful links
- The Kolb-Proust Archive for Research, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- A site with English translations of essays and articles by Proust
- January 2001 conference by Antoine Compagnon, on Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe
- Pierre-Louis Rey on the dialogues in Sodome et Gomorrhe (also available in RealAudio)
- Pictures of Proust, alone and with family and friends
- A site on the Ruiz movie, Le Temps retrouvé, based on the final volume of Proust's novel
- Sabine Sicaud, a precocious poet who died at fifteen
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, the best known woman novelist from the first half of the twentieth century
- Poet
and novelist Anna
de Noailles (also see above and see my introductory pages on her)
- France 3 TV program "Un siècle d'écrivains" on Anna de Noailles
- Three letters from the vast correspondence of Anna de Noailles with Maurice Barrès
- Anna de Noailles' tomb in the Bibesco vault, Cimetière du Père Lachaise, in Paris
- Saint-Exupéry, pilot and author of Le Petit Prince
- Jean Cocteau, "enfant prodige," poet, and film director
- Discover the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos
- The "Pope" of Surrealism, André Breton
- Georges
Bataille, thinker of the extreme
- another site on Bataille
- Maurice Blanchot site
- The poet Paul Éluard (a somewhat surrealistic page, but you can always fall back on Wikipedia)
- Novelist Henri Bosco, who spent 34 years in Morocco
- Controversial French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline
- Jean
Genet, rebel and vagrant
- Société des ami(e)s et lecteurs/lectrices de Jean Genet (renewed in 2006)
- Albert
Camus, essayist, novelist and playwright
- Another site (in English) on Albert Camus
- A comprehensive site on Camus at LiMag (Littératures du Maghreb)
- Philosopher, essayist, and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre
- Nathalie Sarraute
- "New Novelist" Alain Robbe-Grillet
- 2001 interview by Benoît Peeters (this DVD is available for viewing at Notre Dame's Hesburgh library)
- Marguerite Duras, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter
- Up-to-date site on Julien Gracq
- Feminist writer Monique Wittig, conference in Paris, June 2001, organized by Columbia
University
- In memoriam for Wittig, at the University of Arizona
- Poet and essayist Michel Deguy
- J.M.G.
Le Clézio, prolific French/Francophone writer, 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature
- A personal page on Le Clézio
- Le Clézio and Morocco
- Compilation by Le Nouvel Observateur in 2008 when Le Clézio received the Nobel Prize
- Michel Tournier, novelist and essayist
- Jean-Michel Maulpoix, poet and essayist
- Jean Rouaud, winner of the 1990 Prix Goncourt
- An excellent site on novelist Anne Garréta, recipient of the 2002 Prix Médicis
- All you ever wanted to know about Michel Houellebecq, including his recent inflammatory comments
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French Film
- UniFrance.org -- official site for the promotion of French cinema (information on directors, actors, producers)
- AlloCine -- now playing, popular films (with reviews)
- Cinéfil -- another listing of popular films (includes Belgium and Switzerland)
- Forum des images (formerly La Vidéothèque de Paris) -- films, festivals, multimedia, etc.
- Première -- monthly summary of the magazine's contents
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