French Literature Reviews - 2026
Sainte-Beuve, Mes chers amis.
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, "Mes chers amis..."
(edition with a preface and notes by Michel Brix)
Paris, Grasset / "Cahiers rouges", 2006, 431 p.
EAN : 9782246682615
A selection of Sainte-Beuve's articles dedicated to Balzac, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, George Sand, Stendhal, and Vigny.
Sainte-Beuve has a poor reputation.
Both as a critic and as a friend. He is accused of hypocrisy, jealousy, envy, and, to top it all off, shortsightedness. Are these judgments well-founded? This volume gathers a selection of articles focusing on writers who all had a personal connection to him: Balzac, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, George Sand, Stendhal, and Vigny. Clearly, they do not contain praise alone.
Sainte-Beuve was less a friend than a critic, and it is precisely for this reason that he irritated some of his contemporaries. But should we complain about this? What the author of the Lundis sought was not to please authors, but to defend the rights and interests of readers. The reading public is often the great forgotten entity in literature. In Sainte-Beuve, during the 19th century, they found an advocate.
During the nineteenth century, periodical criticism became a central medium for engaging with contemporary literature in France. Writers such as Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve shaped literary debates through their contributions to newspapers and reviews, where they evaluated the works of their peers. This volume assembles a selection of Sainte-Beuve's articles dedicated to Balzac, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, George Sand, Stendhal, and Vigny, focusing on writers who all had a personal connection to him.
Sainte-Beuve has a poor reputation, both as a critic and as a friend, and is accused of hypocrisy, jealousy, envy, and shortsightedness. This volume gathers articles that do not contain praise alone, as Sainte-Beuve was less a friend than a critic. What the author of the Lundis sought was not to please authors, but to defend the rights and interests of readers, finding an advocate in the reading public during the nineteenth century. Readers interested in nineteenth-century French criticism may find it relevant.