MSt Special Subject in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Michaelmas Term 2017-18

Bibliography

Notes:
- Since recent studies build on earlier ones, err on the side of more recent publications. This list
includes few publications that are more than 30 years old; any exceptions below remain
important studies in the field.
- Read as much criticism in French as in English.

On writing a research paper

Booth, Wayne C. et al., The Craft of Research (4th ed., 2016). ProQuest ebook:
solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/OXVU1:LSCOP_OX:oxfaleph000878605.

General surveys of poetry

Aspley, Keith, and Peter France. Poetry in France: Metamorphoses of a Muse (1992).
Bénichou, Paul. Le Sacre de l’écrivain, Le Temps des prophètes, Les Mages romantiques, L’École du
désenchantement, all in Romantismes français, 2 vols. (2004).
Burt, E.S. Poetry’s Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space (1999).
Dobay Rifelj, Carol de. Word and Figure: The Language of Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (1987).
Gleize, Jean-Marie. Poésie et figuration (1983).
Howe, Elizabeth A., Stages of Self: The Dramatic Monologues of Laforgue, Mallarmé and Valéry (1990).
Moussa, Sarga, and Michel Murat, eds. Poésie et orientalisme (2015).
Planté, Christine, ed. Femmes-poètes du XIXe siècle: une anthologie (2nd ed., 2010).
Prendergast, Christopher, ed. Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to Close Reading (1989).
Rabaté, Dominique, ed. Figures du sujet lyrique (1996).
Rabaté, Dominique, Joëlle de Sermet, and Yves Vadé, eds. Modernités 8: Le Sujet lyrique en question
(1996).
Richard, Jean-Pierre. Poésie et profondeur (1955).
Schultz, Gretchen. The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (1999).
Vaillant, Alain, ed. Romantisme 140: Modernité du vers (2008).

Schools, movements, or periods

Bowman, Frank Paul. French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (1990).
Houston, John Porter. French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement: A Study of Poetic Structures (1980).
Illouz, Jean-Nicolas. Le Symbolisme (2014).
Marchal, Bertrand. Lire le Symbolisme (1993).
Mortelette, Yann. Le Parnasse (2006).
Walzer, P.-O. La Révolution des sept: Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Corbière, Cros, Nouveau, Laforgue
(1970).

Versification
N.B. Two helpful glossaries are:
Cornulier, Benoît de. ‘Notions d’analyse métrique’. Available at
http://www.normalesup.org/~bdecornulier
Scott, Clive. ‘French versification: a summary’, pp. 243-55 in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry:
Introductions to Close Reading, ed. Christopher Prendergast (1989).

Aquien, Michèle. La Versification appliquée aux textes (3rd ed., 2010).

Broome, Peter, and Graham Chesters, The Appreciation of Modern French Poetry (1976).
Bristol French Poetry Group, Introduction to French Poetry (1983).
Cornuler, Benoît de. ‘Pour une approche de la poésie métrique au XIXe siècle’, in Romantisme 140:
Modernité du vers, ed. Alain Vaillant (2008)
---. Théorie du vers. Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé (1982).
Gouvard, Jean-Michel. La Versification (1999), revised as La Versification française (2015).
Lewis, Roy. On Reading French Verse: A Study of Poetic Form (1982).
Murat, Michel. Le Vers français: histoire, théorie, esthétique (2000).
Murat, Michel, and Jacuqeline Dangel, eds. Poétique de la rime (2005).
Roubaud, Jacques. La Vieillesse d'Alexandre. Essai sur quelques états récents du vers français (1988).
Scott, Clive. French Verse-Art: A Study (1980).
---. The Poetics of French Verse: Studies in Reading (1998).
---. A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse (1986).

Specific formal considerations

Bernard, Suzanne. Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (1959).
Chevrier, Alain. Le Décasyllabe à césure médiane: histoire du taratantara (2011).
---. Le Sexe des rimes (1996).
---. La Syllabe et l’Écho: histoire de la contrainte monosyllabique (2002).
Gendre, André. Évolution du sonnet français (1996).
Kirby-Smith, Henry Tompkins. The Origins of Free Verse. (1996).
Murat, Michel. ‘Le Dernier Livre de la bibliothèque: une histoire du poème en prose’, in Le Savoir des
genres, ed. Marielle Macé and Raphaël Baroni (2007).
http://www.fabula.org/atelier.php?Histoire_du_poeme_en_prose
---. Le Vers libre (2008).
Scott, Clive. Vers libre: The Emergence of Free Verse in France, 1886-1914 (1990).

Theoretical essays
Adorno, Theodor W. ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (2000).
Culler, Jonathan. ‘Changes in the Study of the Lyric’, in Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker, eds., Lyric
Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (1985).
---. ‘Poetics of the Lyric’, pp. 161-188 in Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of
Literature (1975)
---. Theory of the Lyric (2015).
De Man, Paul, ‘Lyric and Modernity’, in Blindness and Insight (1971).
Jakobson, Roman, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, Style in Language (1960), rpt. in David Lodge, Modern
Criticism and Theory.
Johnson, Barbara. Défigurations du langage poétique (1979).
Kristeva, Julia. La Révolution du langage poétique. L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et
Mallarmé (1974).
Riffaterre, Michael, Semiotics of Poetry (1978).
---. La Production du texte (1979).
Valéry, Paul. ‘Questions de poésie’ and ‘Poésie et pensée abstraite’, in Théorie poétique et esthétique, part
of Variété: Œuvres, vol. 1 (Pléiade, 1957), pp. 1280-1293, 1314-1339. [available on the Prelims
French Sole site on Weblearn]