The impact of World War I: War novels and poetry
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in ignorance by
official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern scientific warfare as
ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of protest. Novels about war,
such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a leading member of the French
Communist Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919,
advocated pacifism and popular power—were relatively few in number, but their success was
enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war poems, Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of
Peace and War), with their unforgettable images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided
new forms to represent the dislocation of the European landscape and its human subjects. This
was a black counterpart to the other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context
of the modern metropolis and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in “Zone,” in Alcools
[1913; Eng. trans. Alcools]).
The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces
with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis
Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme
(“Surrealist Manifesto”) appeared in 1924. Literature and revolution were joined in an explosion
of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous erotic transgression, engendering new forms
of perception and expression. Like Sigmund Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire,
attempting to follow in poetic form Freud’s insights into dream processes while also invoking
(with varying enthusiasm and effect) the revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and
Soupault together published their écriture automatique (“automatic writing”) and looked to the
visual media (film and Cubist painting and photography) as much as to language for
contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in
Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least
the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and
William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrates the mutual
profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by
the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux
amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).
Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a refusal
of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the relationship of
the peasant with the land (as in the works of André Chamson, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and
Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first
years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a
serious writer, with Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed).
In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that,
almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le
Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces
Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centred on lesbian
themes.
Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda’s plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third Republic
was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (1933–34) led to charges of
widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out
in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing “patriotic” leagues and the Front
Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936
and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.
