French Literature

French Literature posts cover writers from Montaigne and Rabelais through Moliere, Racine and Corneille in the seventeenth century, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot in the Enlightenment, the great nineteenth-century novelists Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Hugo, the poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme, and the twentieth-century names Proust, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir and Duras. There are also short notes on the Goncourt prize, the Academie Francaise and its dictionary, and on contemporary writers like Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano and Michel Houellebecq. The pieces try to put writers in their period rather than offering a single canon.