法国现实主义(英文)

Balzac is particularly celebrated for his monumental la Comedie Humaine (The Human Comedy) inspired by that of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s the title given by Balzac to the whole collection of his 90 novels. His project was to present in a series of books, a comprehensive picture of contemporary French society. Among the best-known individual novels of the series are Eugenie Grandet(1833), Le Père Goriot(1834) and La Cousine Bette(1846). Their detailed settings, minute descriptions, and analyses of such dominating passions as social climbing and money-making mark the beginnings of French realism. In these 90 novels and short stories, the Comedie Humaine realistically studies every social class and touches on most fields of knowledge.
An inspiration to many realistic writers, Flaubert is often called the first French realist and a model not only to French authors, but to American and Russians as well. His first published work Madame Bovary cost him five years of hard work. In this masterpiece, Flaubert creates the life and fate of the bourgeoise Emma Bovary. And the novel with its unrelenting objectivity and detachment marks the beginning of a new era in literature.
Stendhal left behind 33 works, of which nineteen were published posthumously. He began his career as a critic, then he went on to write travel notes, autobiography and fiction. In all he used more than 170 pseudonyms, his real name being Marie Henri Beyle. The most famous of his pseudonyms, Stendhal, was a borrowing from the name of a small Prussian town of Stendhal. It was the birthplace of J.J.Winckelmann, a famous German art critic.
ஐ Naturalistic novels and naturalists
Unlike the realist novels the naturalistic novel is not only a record of men and manners. (Balzac announced that the novelist was the historian of manners and that the novelist made a scientific contribution by studying society and culture.) To the naturalists the novel is a demonstration of social law. The novelist is not an historian who observes merely; he is a scientist, a biologist, who observes, and on the basis of his observation, draws a general theory of human conduct. The novel is thus his experiment which demonstrates the truth of his general theory.
Secondly, naturalism changed the technique of the novelist. The realist observed a general situation and invented the incidents which would make that situation vivid. The naturalist was, according to Zola’s theory at any rate, not permitted to invent. The language he used must be the actual language used by the people he was describing. “A slice of life” was Zola’s motto.
❈ Honoré de Balzac (1799—1850)
Balzac has been called “the French Dickens”, as Dickens has been called “the English Balzac”. He grew up under the regime of NapoleonⅠ. And it was partly a desire to be a Napoleon of the pen that fired his ambition. When in 1819 his parents consented to let him try his hand at writing, he shut himself in a dingy attic and went to work with a will. Volumes of thrillers flowed from his pen.
Balzac’s opportunities for observing the contemporary scene were increased by constant journeys in France and different parts of Europe. His wild circle of friends and acquaintances brought him into contact with many walks of life. No novelist has filled his pages with men and women drawn from so many different spheres, nor with characters so widely representative of human passions and weaknesses.
❈ Gustave Flaubert (1821—1880)
He is one of the great literary artists of the 19th century. Though less fertile and nging than Balzac, he is much more of a conscious artist whose work constitutes an epoch in the history of the art of fiction. He expended enormous effort on finding exactly the right word or phrase( which he called “le seul mot juste”) in the right place, omitting every irrelevant detail and never using the same word twice on one page. In this way he developed a brilliant prose style which seems on the surface disarmingly simple and direct.
❈ Émile Zola (1840—1902)
Zola was the founder of the naturalist school. He was most obviously a product of his age: he believed almost blindly scientific determinism, which was the prevailing philosophy of the later 19th century. He was particularly influenced by the views on environment and heredity. He defined the theory of naturalism and illustrated it in his great work entitled Les Rougen-Macquarts. This huge collection contains twenty novels and claimed to be a scientific study of a family from the point of view of heredity-how the family character passed from parent to child and how it was influenced by the social and physical environment.