Introduction

william burgwinkle, nicholas hammond,

and emma wilson

This volume combines the expertise of a large number of distinguished aca-

demics and promising younger scholars, from Europe and North America,
writing about their specialisations from a variety of literary, historical, and
theoretical perspectives. It is intended to serve as an introduction to the major
writings in French and also to the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of
France over the centuries and of the French-speaking world. It should be of
use to undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers alike.
Although most major French and francophone authors are covered in the
course of the volume and can be easily referenced in the index, The Cambridge
History of French Literature is inspired not only by period and historical concerns
but also by topical and theoretical points of view. The topics outlined in
this introduction, and addressed variously through the contributions to this
history, were selected on the basis of their continuing interest to current and
future researchers, their relevance to the place of French-language writing in
European and world cultural production, and as a way of distinguishing this
volume from other such volumes produced in the past. Contributors were
encouraged to address one or more of the following topics in their essays,
not necessarily as the focus of the essay but as a way of suggesting how the
subject of their discussion is informed by one or more of these issues.

The oral and the written

While the earliest vernacular texts composed in French (from the late eleventh
century to the early twelfth century) are marked by signs of orality in compo-
sition, rhetoric, and even manuscript presentation, what we read today as the
signifiers of an oral or written text are imprecise and were often deliberately
blurred in the Middle Ages. Far from indicating an evolution of mentalities,
in which a culture would move from a period of primitive delivery into some

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 william burgwinkle, nicholas hammond, and emma wilson

superior form of written transmission, the oral and written are both exploited
contemporaneously throughout the Middle Ages and the two modes emerge
as interdependent. Signs of oral composition continued to be exploited into
the later Middle Ages, long after manuscript compilation had become com-
monplace, and questions raised about the truth value of speech and written
communication extend, even by the thirteenth century, into intense debates
about the proper language and format for discussions of theology, poetry, and
history – prose or verse. Is oral communication to be trusted as more spon-
taneous and unmediated or distrusted as more likely to deceive? Arguments
about the truth value of verse and prose, of rhetoric v. ‘natural’ communica-
tion, extend well into the early modern period and far beyond. Literary salons
of the seventeenth century, often derided as spaces of artifice and rhetoric in
which the veneer and sheen of sophistication overwhelmed any possibility
of sincerity, could also be championed as sites of rhetorical inventiveness, in
which a new language – often a language associated with women – presented
an alternative, and some resistance, to patriarchal and hackneyed norms. And
in the modern period, orality has re-emerged as central to an understanding
of postcolonial writings, both because of the competing voices and languages
that are highlighted by authors from nations subjected to colonial domination
(as in internalised oral and written sources) and because the study of testimony
and oral traditions – traditions that might challenge the terms of colonialist and
imperialist languages – is currently being revitalised and revalorised. As the
questions of literary value, and what constitutes a text, have been rethought
in the second half of the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century texting,
blogging, recorded interviews, and DVD commentaries – the spoken word
as privileged indicator of subjective identity, critique and resistance – have
emerged as critical to an understanding of literary and cultural production in
the age of new media, in which quick oral transmission sometimes appears to
be winning out over the written word.

Writing in/from the periphery

Following on from the issue of oral transmission is the question of the place
and space of writing and speaking. Where are modes of communication
produced and for whom are they destined? These are essential questions
for understanding twenty-first-century issues about culture, especially global
culture, but they are by no means new. From the late eleventh century,
contact between Western Christendom and ‘the East’ (the Byzantine Empire
and the Levant) had become ever more frequent with the development of

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 Introduction

new trade routes and frequent travel, often in the form of Crusades. By the
mid-twelfth century there were four prospering Latin centres surrounding
Jerusalem and these inhabitants traded in culture and language as well as in
goods. This early contact with the East influenced almost every aspect of
French medieval literature – genres, themes, manuscripts – but the French
language also absorbed influences from these encounters, as it coexisted with
and slowly replaced Latin, moving into a dominant position as a sort of lin-
gua franca across Western Europe. By the early modern period, a buoyant
tradition of travel literature had developed that demonstrated an interest
both in other peoples and cultures and in justifying a Western and Christian
presence around the world. Texts that highlight contact between France and
(the) new world(s) figure prominently in the period of the Enlightenment,
at which time other peoples and cultures are often seen not as inferior to
the European but as mirror images that can offer up correctives to Western
Christian corruption. Anxieties persisted throughout the nineteenth century
regarding religious and cultural adaptation: how far should Christianity go
in adapting to other cultures’ norms, including linguistic norms? Fascination
with the ‘Orient’ and fantasised forms of ‘Oriental exoticism’ accompany the
colonial aspirations of France through the nineteenth century into the first
part of the twentieth century. The modern period has also seen, however, the
development of an extraordinary range of writings from the French-speaking
world that challenge the dominance of metropolitan France and Parisian intel-
lectual authority. Questions of identity and belonging, covering the construc-
tion of community, language use, imperialism and indigenous subordination,
become major thematic elements in literary and historiographical writings
in the post-World War II era, while questions of geography and boundaries,
literal and metaphorical, play a burning role in political and historical rhetoric
into the twenty-first century.

Alterity and alienation

The Middle Ages, relatively free from the rigidity of nationalist thinking, are
nonetheless marked by a particular meditation on otherness in all its forms,
including religious, sexual, and ethnic. Madness, disease, sodomy, heresy –
all of these haunt the borders of medieval texts and tell us more about the
construction of medieval norms than they do about medieval tolerance. In
the early modern period, a particular sort of alienation from the self, such
that ‘le moi’, the sense of self as self, can be seen as quite separate not only
from the body but from the social group as well. The self-confidence of

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 william burgwinkle, nicholas hammond, and emma wilson

seventeenth-century political and religious thought gives way to a greater

questioning in the eighteenth century. Issues of intimacy/privacy became the
focus of much early modern writing, precisely at a time when notions of
the private and public were changing, sometimes radically. These questions
are central to the thought of social theorists by the mid-nineteenth century,
and they are transmitted as well to the modern period, sometimes most
memorably in literary form. The distinction between self and other, the other
as untouchable and alien, the other inside ourselves – all of these are subjected
to the scrutiny of psychoanalytical and philosophical investigation and the
introspective attention of authors such as Proust, Beauvoir or NDiaye. These
questions cut across literature and theory, and have opened new perspectives
on madness, mourning, race, ethics and sexuality that continue to challenge
the validity of fixed identity categories.

Literature and history

History as a discipline is already practised during the Middle Ages, though not
always in recognisable form. Fiction and history can scarcely be distinguished
one from the other but medieval ‘historical’ texts tend to be supplemented by
a combination of chronicles, memoirs, and eyewitness accounts, with the aim
of presenting some notion of verifiable truth. For the same reason, medieval
authors often refer obsessively to a source text, real or imagined, to which
they owe their material and their fidelity. From the Crusaders’ chronicles to
the Grandes Chroniques de France and the narratives of Joinville, Villehardouin,
and Froissart, authors traced and constructed the genealogies and myths of
a French, Christian identity and its shaping through the interpretation of
historical events. The explosion of memoirs and the reutilisation of inherited
themes and plots in the early modern period give evidence of a continued
interest in the past but also accentuate, once again, the often uneasy division
between history and fiction. History and the rewriting of history reaches a
particularly crucial point at the time of the Revolution, during which politically
opposed points of view were put forward to explain the same supposedly
verifiable event. France’s involvement in the two World Wars and the wars of
colonial independence in the twentieth century further calls into question the
relation of literature to history and the necessity of considering the individual
point of view as well as the global. Literary texts are increasingly seen as
essential to constructing and questioning a historical perspective. Modernity’s
yoking of literature to commemoration, personal and national, has led to

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 Introduction

an expansion of the definition of literature to include testimony, archival

investigations, verbal and photographic evidence and oral history.

Popular culture
Medieval literature often defies scholarly attempts to categorise it with refer-
ence to audience or genre. Bawdy tales include frequent religious references;
sex and transgressive themes share centre-stage in romance and song with
moralising denunciations of that very material; pious epics include all the
barbarity and gore of twenty-first-century action films, and all seem to have
been equally appreciated. For some, the popular might be distinguished from
the learned by considerations of language, references and register, but actual
audiences’ consumption of genres and themes is difficult to determine, even
to the point that the distinction between clerical and secular remains mud-
dled. Popular culture is therefore everywhere in the Middle Ages and most
literature seems to appeal to most people, regardless of social class. The ques-
tion of popular culture manifests itself in increasingly interesting ways in the
early modern period, from the bawdy tales of Rabelais, to satirical and rev-
olutionary street songs, to newspaper editorials and the political theatre of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the modern period, in particular,
popular culture has been increasingly recognised as an essential component
of cultural analysis, and literary scholars have shown an increased interest in
visual media of all sorts, from bandes dessinées to digital video and the internet.
Film studies has developed sometimes in inter-relation with literary studies
and the two fields increasingly overlap, offering new attention to reception
and spectatorship, to authorship, and to genre.

Visual culture
While visual culture has exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
the taste for and emphasis on visual material goes much further back in French
history. Manuscript culture is inseparable from medieval literature, and a full
understanding of medieval texts is impossible without some consideration
of the forms in which they were transmitted. In sacred books and romance,
illustration plays a major role as miniatures comment on and disrupt the texts
they pretend to be explicating. Knowing where a text figures in a manuscript
can be as enlightening to a reader as understanding its commentary; it can tell
us what associations were being made between one text and another at the
time of its inscription, as well as the occasions on which it might have played

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 william burgwinkle, nicholas hammond, and emma wilson

a role. The increasing prominence of visual material in the early modern

period is demonstrated not only in paintings and sculptures and the return to
Classical models, but in the attention paid to architecture, theatre of all types,
and political pageants. This is a period when a building can speak not only
to its predecessors and its own ambitions to rival ancient splendour, but can
also portray its patron in all his/her ambition and desire to be associated with
grandeur, reason, or clever play. Painting and photography in the nineteenth
century, and cinema in the twentieth century, became dominant modes of
artistic expression and the recording of reality, and challenged literary modes
of representation. Poets and novelists engaged in writing art criticism, draw-
ing the fields of the verbal and the visual more closely together, while the
questioning of relations between the different senses and different media,
through synaesthesia and the transposition d’art, allowed new exchanges to be
developed. From Romanticism to realism, Symbolism, and surrealism, and
equally through both literary adaptation and auteurism in cinema, the inter-
relation between literature and visual culture is opened out in new ways with
divergent results.

Sexualities
The medieval period has often been described as the moment when Western
Christian sexualities developed rhetorically and were set in place through
law and religious orthodoxy. Yet neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality
appear as firmly established discursive entities in medieval genres: both are
ever-present as competing modalities and attract throughout the period the
kind of polarised polemics that marked the close of the twentieth century. Dis-
cussions of alternative sexualities and cross-dressing abound in the early mod-
ern period, not only in the ‘libertin’ writings of the eighteenth century but also
in writers such as Montaigne and the rage for memoirs, letters, and anecdotes
that characterise their literary production. By the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, new explorations of sexual pathologies and perversion
intersect with a flowering of ‘decadent’ writing. While the autobiographical
and questions of eroticism and exposure dominate some twentieth-century
writings on sexuality and intimacy, the latter part of the century witnesses
a newly politicised (and differently embodied) engagement with sexuality
in the wake of HIV/AIDS. Contemporary writing in French today shows
increased attention to the reshaping of societal structures to incorporate alter-
native forms of family, shifting identity politics, and transgression as an end in
itself.

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 Introduction

Women writers
While largely a domain limited to men, writing in the Middle Ages was not
exclusively masculine. From the trobairitz to Marie de France and Christine
de Pizan, women often fired the first shots of discontent with the status quo
and offered witty corrections to patriarchal modes of social organisation.
In spite of the many restrictions imposed on women in the early modern
period, each century produced writers of subtlety and distinction. Women
increasingly engaged in literary work during the Renaissance period, following
the royal model of Marguérite de Navarre, and the emergence of the literary
salon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with a greater
emancipation for women’s writing and an increase of control over their
production. From questions about the value and status of women’s writing in
the nineteenth century, to questions about the senses, sensuality, the intimate,
and the melancholic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writing by
women has come to the fore in France and the French-speaking world in
the modern period, and has presented a challenge to traditional notions of
genre and stable categories of identity. While much feminist scholarship of
the twentieth century was occupied with excavating women’s writing and
bringing it to a wider public, the twenty-first century has seen a remarkable
expansion of women into important positions in all modes of literary and
artistic production, including film-making, photography and installation art.

Literature and religion

Much of medieval literature is touched by an encounter with religious thought.
Clerics, both as patrons and authors, left their mark on contemporary liter-
ary production, but not always in ways that would receive an ecclesiastical
imprimatur. Although it is clear that some texts were composed for monastic
audiences, for religious propaganda, or as philosophical/theological apolo-
giae, this would hardly account for those texts that are the most popular and
well known amongst a modern audience. Nor would it indicate that medieval
literature is subject to monologic interpretation. Many of the age’s texts are
subversive of religious dogma even when they were produced for what would
seem to be a church audience; and many of the lyrics and romances take on
topics that would have been anathema to orthodox church figures. Religion
in the early modern period is no less present in the literary texts, though
again not from any one point of view, but it cannot be interpreted without
understanding its link to the religious struggles that left such a mark on the

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 william burgwinkle, nicholas hammond, and emma wilson

period, from the Wars of Religion to the Edict of Nantes. The sixteenth cen-
tury could even be termed a golden age for religious poetry, philosophy and
theatre, despite the sometimes polarised presentation. Yet the seventeenth
and especially the eighteenth century are equally marked by religious ques-
tions, particularly in the rise of secularisation and the critique of religion that
followed on from Enlightenment thought. The confrontation between reli-
gious dogma and reason becomes more politicised and increasingly central to
philosophy throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and in the
modern period, questions of personal faith and doubt give way to broader
questioning of the relation between religion, nation, culture and prejudice.
The tumultuous events of the twentieth century reinstated religion as a major
issue in the construction and analysis of culture, from the after-effects of the
Dreyfus Affair and representations of the Shoah and the Occupation in France,
through to contemporary engagement with the importance of Islam in French
and francophone writing.

Literature and politics

Medieval subjectivity was not constructed entirely through religious dis-
course, despite what some scholars have argued, and many of the most
influential texts from the period concentrate precisely on the contested bor-
derline between philosophy, theology and politics. Vernacular saints’ lives, to
take just one example, offer a privileged view of how religion constructs com-
munities as well as controls them, and how it serves to validate and question
notions of sovereignty and servitude. An imagined politics dominates in the
early chansons de geste, as rebellious noblemen wage war against their legiti-
mate lords and feudal models of reciprocal duties and protections come in for
critical examination. The Inquisition and the uneasy journey towards a unified
French identity in the late fifteenth century produced a mass of political docu-
mentation in which both truth and Christian values are shown as contingent
and malleable. With increased royal patronage of the arts and literature, it is
difficult to separate politics and writing in the early modern period. For the
first time, the theatre, for example, became a symbol of national prestige, and
playwrights were expected to produce works depicting the heroism of great
leaders. This politicisation of literature (or rather open admission of politici-
sation) comes to the fore in the late nineteenth century, when authors openly
use their works to address political issues and influence political opinions.
This tendency continues in the first half of the twentieth century, as writers
return with due obsession to the relation between literature and politics, the

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 Introduction

problem and challenge of committed writing, culminating in the events of

1968. This inter-relation of politics and literature, never absent from the his-
tory of French writing, evolves nonetheless in the twenty-first century into a
more theoretical questioning of politics itself and of the politics of writing. The
development of new modes of transmission and commentary in the form of
shared internet sites and blogs has further destabilised the boundaries between
political and artistic production and opened the door to new understandings
of the literary.

Memory and testimony

The earliest text of vernacular French literature deals with a virgin martyr and
the need to memorialise her and others’ sacrifices as constitutive of Christian
communities. From the bloody wars of religion, including the Crusades, to
the struggles for a centralised kingship, medieval literature struggles with how
language communities construct a shared past and process profound losses
and a sense of shame. These problems plague the early modern period as
well, as religious massacres and natural disasters are celebrated, bemoaned
and commemorated in diverse ways, depending on religious and political affil-
iation. Memory acquires a particular significance and fragility in the period,
not least in the part played by antiquity in early modern culture and the impe-
tus to recreate and better the past. Modern texts have found new strategies
to represent ungraspable impressions: memories of events whose magnitude
and violence threaten to collapse conventional literary forms. New modes,
new forms, new temporalities of writing emerge from such experience and
have been particularly innovative in the period post-World War II.

Autobiography
Though largely an early modern invention, autobiography exists in the inter-
stices between medieval genres. The Confessions of Saint Augustine carried
enormous weight throughout the Middle Ages and prompted a host of authors
to tell their own autobiographical tales of conversion and salvation. Lyric
poetry also flirted with autobiographical revelations, especially in the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries; and the first biographical texts in the vernacular
tradition, the razos of the troubadours, explicitly linked biography and autobi-
ography to history, as bricks in the construction of cultural capital. Augustine
continued to be immensely influential in the early modern period, as wit-
nessed by the Essais of Montaigne, and at the same time, as new theories

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 william burgwinkle, nicholas hammond, and emma wilson

of the self were developing, so too interest in autobiographical writing was

growing, culminating in the extraordinary confessional writings of Rousseau.
The genre of autobiography, upheld within nineteenth-century analysis, and
the foregrounding of the modern self in isolation, is effectively parodied and
dismantled in the subsequent century in a range of texts which put on display
authors’ doubts about truth, the transparency of the literary text, and the
coherence of the identity produced by an ‘I’ in writing. This deconstructive
approach to autobiographical writing is more than matched, however, by an
outpouring of do-it-yourself video practitioners, bloggers, and social network-
ing sites, for whom the expression of the self in writing, pictures, images and
music becomes the dominant mode of expression – popular and literary – in
the first decade of the twenty-first century.

It is our hope that through the essays that follow you will not only get to
know the present better by visiting the past, but also be illuminated by that
past through encountering its continual rewriting, forgetting, inscription, and
reinscription within the dominant paradigms of the ages that followed. We do
not expect a linear reading of the material any more than we expect a linear
development of the literature that is being cited. French literary history circles
back upon itself through time and advances across what Michel Foucault called
epistèmes by denying its debts to the past and reconstructing a present from its
detritus. Writing in French is as healthy and productive as it has ever been,
and it is our hope that in celebrating the diversity of that production we can
contribute to its continued vitality.

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