Michel de Montaigne of France is best known for popularizing what kind of writing as a literary genre?
"of his time. He believed that humans are not able to attain true certainty. The longest of his essays, ""Apology for Raymond Sebond"", marking his adoption of Pyrrhonism contains his famous motto, ""What do I know?"" Montaigne considered marriage necessary for the raising of children, but disliked strong feelings of passionate love because he saw them as detrimental to freedom. In education, he favored concrete examples and experience over the teaching of abstract knowledge that has to be accepted uncritically. His essay ""On the Education of Children"" is dedicated to Diana of Foix. The ""Essais"" exercised important influence on both"
"along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: How do you live? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, considered by many to be the first truly modern individual. He wrote free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experience, unlike anything written before. More than four hundred years later, Montaigne’s honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment —and in search of themselves."
"especially himself, with utter frankness. Montaigne's writings are studied as literature and philosophy around the world. Inspired by his consideration of the lives and ideals of the leading figures of his age, he finds the great variety and volatility of human nature to be its most basic features. He describes his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disdain for the human pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for his timely death. He writes about his disgust with the religious conflicts"
"most famous work, ""Essais"", created the literary genre of the essay. French poetry during that century was embodied by Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay. Both writers founded the La Pléiade literary movement. During the 17th century, Madame de La Fayette published anonymously ""La Princesse de Clèves"", a novel that is considered to be one of the very first psychological novels of all times. Jean de La Fontaine is one of the most famous fabulists of that time, as he wrote hundreds of fables, some being far more famous than others, such as ""The Ant and the Grasshopper"". Generations"
"be able to see the deity that created them. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) may have been Catholic, but his anti-dogmatic stances made him the father of the anti-conformist French spirit. His work consists of little trials for his beliefs, filled with autobiographical and casual anecdotes. His intention with these papers was to leave something by which family could remember him. He was the first person to use the word essays, and his writings came to be highly influential upon Shakespeare, Rousseau and Nietzsche. His radical scepticism, summed up in the phrase ""Que sais-je?"", served as one of the catalysts"
"for the comedies he wrote in 1722–1723. Among the most popular are ""Jean de France"" and ""Erasmus Montanus"", both in the satirical style of Molière with pretentious, stereotyped characters. The first is about a Dane who, after picking up notions of the French language and lifestyle while in Paris, tries to impress his countrymen on his return to Denmark. The second presents Rasmus Berg, the son of a farmer. On completing his college education, he Latinized his name to Montanus and became a menace to his family and neighbours with all he has learned. Neoclassical poetry, drama, and the essay"
"as Miguel Cervantes' ""Don Quixote"" (1605/1615) The term ""chapbook"" is also in use for present-day publications, commonly short, inexpensive booklets. Heroic Romance is a genre of imaginative literature, which flourished in the 17th century, principally in France. The beginnings of modern fiction in France took a pseudo-bucolic form, and the celebrated ""L'Astrée"", (1610) of Honore d'Urfe (1568–1625), which is the earliest French novel, is properly styled a pastoral. Although its action was, in the main, languid and sentimental, there was a side of the Astree which encouraged that extravagant love of glory, that spirit of "" panache"", which was now"
"the work of Heliodorus of Emesa or Achilles Tatius), but they also straddle the line between fiction and philosophical or encyclopedic writing, and frequently veer off into discussions of moral phenomena or in symbolic ekphrasis (inspired by the ""Hypnerotomachia Poliphili"") of cabinets of curiosities, architecture and other elements. His most famous work is the playful, chaotic, baroque, sometimes obscene and almost unreadable ""Moyen de parvenir"" (first published around 1617) -- a parody of books of ""table talk"", of Rabelais and of Michel de Montaigne's ""The Essays""—in which a host of famous individuals debate, discuss and joke (with often coarse humor)"
"Genre fiction Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term used in the book-trade for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specifically literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre. Although genre fiction is generally distinguished from literary fiction, a number of major literary figures have also written genre fiction, for example, John Banville, publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black, and both Doris Lessing, and Margaret Atwood have written science fiction. Georges Simenon, the creator of the Maigret detective novels, has been described by André Gide as"
"would become the inspiration for a vast body of literature that would take on many and diverse forms. There was a side of the ""Astrée"" that encouraged an extravagant love of glory, that spirit of ""panache,"" which was now rising to its height in France. The fledglings of the genre were published in the 1620s. These earlier works highlight the chivalrous actions of their heroes through hinting that they were well-known public characters of the day in romantic disguises. Yet, the earliest novel that can be attributed to the genre is the celebrated ""Polexandre"" (1629) by Marin le Roy, sieur"
"Literary fiction Literary fiction is a term used in the book-trade to distinguish novels that are regarded as having literary merit from most commercial or ""genre"" fiction. All the same, a number of major literary figures have also written genre fiction, for example, John Banville publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black, and both Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood have written science fiction. Furthermore, Nobel laureate André Gide stated that Georges Simenon, best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret, was ""the most novelistic of novelists in French literature"". Neal Stephenson has suggested that, while any definition will"
"be analysed in terms of existential categories (""existentiale""); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the existentialist movement. Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as well as theoretical texts. These years also saw the growing reputation of Heidegger's book ""Being and Time"" outside Germany. Sartre dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel ""Nausea"" and the short stories in his 1939"
"contemporaries. However, he was unhappy about his success as the author of adventure novels and soon tried to gain literary recognition with social satires such as ""Le Tueur de Tigres"" (1853), but in vain. He returned to popular literature with more swashbucklers such as ""La Louve"" (1855) (a sequel to his earlier ""Le Loup Blanc"") and ""L'Homme de Fer"" (1856). His biggest success in the genre was ""Le Bossu"" (1857) in which a prodigious swordsman, Henri de Lagardère, disguises himself as a hunchback to avenge his friend the Duke de Nevers, murdered by the villainous Prince de Gonzague. It features"
"be one of the greatest masters of comedy of the Western literature, wrote dozens of plays, including ""Le Misanthrope"", ""L'Avare"", ""Le Malade imaginaire"", and ""Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme"". His plays have been so popular around the world that French language is sometimes dubbed as ""the language of Molière"" (""la langue de Molière""), just like English is considered as ""the language of Shakespeare"". French literature and poetry flourished even more in the 18th and 19th centuries. Denis Diderot's best-known works are ""Jacques the Fatalist"" and ""Rameau's Nephew"". He is however best known for being the main redactor of the ""Encyclopédie"", whose aim"
"IX of Aquitaine, who wrote in Occitan. Much medieval French poetry and literature were inspired by the legends of the Matter of France, such as ""The Song of Roland"" and the various chansons de geste. The ""Roman de Renart"", written in 1175 by Perrout de Saint Cloude, tells the story of the mediaeval character Reynard ('the Fox') and is another example of early French writing. An important 16th-century writer was François Rabelais, whose novel ""Gargantua and Pantagruel"" has remained famous and appreciated until now. Michel de Montaigne was the other major figure of the French literature during that century. His"
"frénétiques"" (frantic novels), which became the first subgenre of popular literature. Notable works in that category include: Eventually, the ""roman noir"" gave way to more modern forms of the ""fantastique"". One was the ""feuilleton"", stories serialized in daily instalments in newspapers; the other was the popular novel, published in inexpensive formats, catering to large audiences. In the true tradition of popular fiction, these were often considered cheap thrills, good only for the barely educated masses. On the more respectable side of the literary fence, the 19th century fantastique literature after 1830 was dominated by the influence of E. T. A."
"your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject."" Montaigne's essay topics spanned the entire spectrum of the profound to the trivial, with titles ranging from ""Of Sadness and Sorrow"" and ""Of Conscience"" to ""Of Smells"" and ""Of Posting"" (referring to posting letters). Montaigne wrote at a time preceded by Catholic and Protestant ideological tension. Christianity in the 15th and 16th centuries saw protestant authors consistently attempting to subvert Church doctrine with their own reason and scholarship. Consequently, Catholic scholars embraced skepticism as a means to discredit all reason and scholarship and accept Church doctrine through faith alone. Montaigne never"
"the pioneers of the short story and novella, and also as an innovator in fantasy fiction. His novellas, particularly ""Colomba"", ""Mateo Falcone"", ""Tamango"" and ""La Vénus d'Ille"", are widely taught in French schools as examples of vivid style and concision. Mérimée was an important figure in the Romantic movement of French literature in the 19th century. Like the other Romantics, he used picturesque and exotic settings (particularly Spain and Corsica) to create an atmosphere, and looked more often at the Middle Ages than to classical Greece or Rome for his inspiration. He also frequently used themes of fantasy and the"
"Jean de Sponde). However, the horrors of the war were also to inspire one Protestant poet, Agrippa d'Aubigné, to write a brilliant poem on the conflict:""Les Tragiques"". Principal French poetry collections published in the 16th century: In the first half of the century, the novel in France was still dominated by the chivalric novels of the Middle Ages (in their prose versions) such as: ""Les Quatre fils Aymon"" (or ""Renaud de Montauban""), ""Fierabras"", ""Ogier le Danois"", ""Perceforest"" and ""Galien le Réthoré"". From 1540 on however, the genre was dominated by foreign productions, most notably the Hispano-Portuguese multi-volume adventure novels ""Amadis"
"occasionally took the form of moral exhortation - which foreshadowed the practice of later Neoclassical preachers - and drew on the lives of the saints as moral exemplars, of whom Charles Borromeo and Ignatius of Loyola were favorite of his. Jean-Pierre Camus was one of the most prolific authors of the period 1620-1648. His prose is succinct, without the elaborate rhetoric of authors—such as Antoine de Nervèze—from the previous generation. He also shows a vast knowledge of poetry. Camus's first works were strongly influenced by the ""Essays"" of Michel de Montaigne, albeit with more religious content. His spiritual works were"
"a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth"". Sainte-Beuve advises us that ""to restore lucidity and proportion to our judgments, let us read every evening a page of Montaigne."" The American philosopher Eric Hoffer employed Montaigne both stylistically and in thought. In Hoffer's memoir, ""Truth Imagined"", he said of Montaigne, ""He was writing about me. He knew my innermost thoughts."" The British novelist John Cowper Powys expressed his admiration for Montaigne's philosophy in his books ""Suspended Judgements"" (1916) and ""The Pleasures of Literature"" (1938). Judith N. Shklar introduces her book ""Ordinary Vices"" (1984), ""It is"
"the present day. The form of writing now commonplace across the world—the novel—originated from the early modern period and grew in popularity in the next century. Before the modern novel became established as a form there first had to be a transitional stage when ""novelty"" began to appear in the style of the epic poem. Plays for entertainment (as opposed to religious enlightenment) returned to Europe's stages in the early modern period. William Shakespeare is the most notable of the early modern playwrighters, but numerous others made important contributions, including Pierre Corneille, Molière, Jean Racine, Pedro Calderón de la Barca,"
"it is called Siglo de Oro and Grand Siècle respectively. The most famous authors beside playwrights include Jean de La Fontaine and Charles Perrault known primarily for their fables. Miguel de Cervantes's ""Don Quixote"" has been called ""the first novel"" by many literary scholars (or the first of the modern European novels). It was published in two parts. The first part was published in 1605 and the second in 1615. It might be viewed as a parody of ""Le Morte d'Arthur"" (and other examples of the chivalric romance), in which case the novel form would be the direct result of"
"essays by Michel de Montaigne, and like Montaigne’s essays these poems juxtapose stories of personal experience with philosophy, politics, and ancient knowledge, moving from point to point by associative leaps rather than carefully arranged logical arguments. Throughout the manuscript the image of fire recurs as a metaphor for both destruction and renewal. The most prominent theme in the book is that of ""awakening."" The speakers of these poems seem always to be ""waking to the light of our failures,"" (from ""We Are Bored"") determined, this time, to see the world more clearly—to get the story right. Chosen by Denise Duhamel"
"Philippe-Ignace-Francois Aubert de Gaspé is widely regarded as the first French-Canadian novel. The genres which first became popular were the rural novel and the historical novel. French authors were influential, especially authors like Balzac. In 1866, Father Henri-Raymond Casgrain became one of Quebec's first literary theorists. He argued that literature's goal should be to project an image of proper Catholic morality. However, a few authors like Louis-Honoré Fréchette and Arthur Buies broke the conventions to write more interesting works. This pattern continued until the 1930s with a new group of authors educated at the Université Laval and the Université de"
"Marquis de Sade bibliography Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, best known as the Marquis de Sade, was a French aristocrat, revolutionary and author of philosophical and sadomasochistic novels exploring such controversial subjects as rape, bestiality and necrophilia. His works evidence a philosophical mind advocating a materialist philosophy in which Nature dictates absolute freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law, with the pursuit of personal pleasure as its foremost principle. Besides novels, he wrote philosophical tracts, novellas, short tales, and a number of plays (many of which no longer extant). Publication, dissemination, and translation of his works have long been hindered"
"such writers as Eustache Deschamps and Guillaume de Machaut. In England Geoffrey Chaucer helped establish Middle English as a literary language with his ""Canterbury Tales"", which contained a wide variety of narrators and stories (including some translated from Boccaccio). The spread of vernacular literature eventually reached as far as Bohemia, and the Baltic, Slavic and Byzantine worlds. Music was an important part of both secular and spiritual culture, and in the universities it made up part of the ""quadrivium"" of the liberal arts. From the early 13th century, the dominant sacred musical form had been the motet; a composition with"
"be accepted uncritically. Montaigne's essay ""On the Education of Children"" is dedicated to Diana of Foix. English journalist and politician J. M. Robertson argued that Montaigne's essays had a profound influence on the plays of William Shakespeare, citing their similarities in language, themes and structures. The remarkable modernity of thought apparent in Montaigne's essays, coupled with their sustained popularity, made them arguably the most prominent work in French philosophy until the Enlightenment. Their influence over French education and culture is still strong. The official portrait of former French president François Mitterrand pictured him facing the camera, holding an open copy"
"Romanzo d' appendice Romanzo d'appendìce (Italian for Feuilleton) was a popular genre in literature, which originated in England and France, in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th. This literary genre is characterised by the existence of many and often recurring characters, and by many cliffhangers at the end of a chapter, to ensure sales of the next episode. This is a clear case of form influencing content: these novels were published in episodes in newspapers and could in a certain sense be compared to modern soap opera. Ponson du Terrail, Eugene Sue, Maurice Leblanc,"
"world, including to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and the United States. European literature underwent a major transformation during the ""Belle Époque"". Literary realism and naturalism achieved new heights. Among the most famous French realist or naturalist authors are Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola. Realism gradually developed into modernism, which emerged in the 1890s and came to dominate European literature during the ""Belle Époque""s final years and throughout the interwar years. The Modernist classic ""In Search of Lost Time"" was begun by Marcel Proust in 1909, to be published after World War I. The works of German Thomas Mann had a"
"manners of the 17th century were permanently changed by it. From the 1660s, three poets stand out. Jean de La Fontaine gained enormous celebrity through his Aesop inspired ""Fables"" (1668–1693) which were written in an irregular verse form (different meter lengths are used in a poem). Jean Racine was seen as the greatest tragedy writer of his age. Finally, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux became the theorizer of poetic classicism: his ""Art poétique"" (1674) praised reason and logic (Boileau elevated Malherbe as the first of the rational poets), believability, moral usefulness and moral correctness; it elevated tragedy and the poetic epic as the"
"novel, was another notable contribution to French literature. When he began his writing career in the 1830s, the most prominent genres were the drama (Victor Hugo and Musset), poetry (Hugo, Lamartine and Vigny), and the autobiography (Chateaubriand). Mérimée perfected the short story, with an economy of words and action. The contemporary literary critic Sainte-Beuve wrote: ""...He goes right to the fact, and goes immediately into action... his story is clear, lean, alert, vivid. In the dialogues of his characters there is not a useless word, and in his actions he lays out in this advance exactly how and why it"
"where ordinary boys and girls were taught basic literacy. Moreover, Protestantism no longer saw women as weak and evil sinners; rather, women were worthy companions of men and should be educated in order to become capable wives. Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), the last love of Michel de Montaigne, edited the third edition of Montaigne's ""Essays"" after his death. She also wrote two feminist essays, ""The Equality of Men and Women"" (1622) and ""The Ladies' Grievance"" (1626). In 1673, François Poullain de la Barre wrote ""De l'égalité des deux sexes"" (On the equality of the two sexes). The 17th century saw"