Aragon and the Mediterranean - Poetry and Poetics

French Literature Reviews - 2026

Aragon and the Mediterranean
Poetry and Poetics

Aragon et la Méditerranée. Espaces, mémoire, poétiques
collection "Var & poésie", 260 pages, 15 €, ISBN 978-2-9527830-1-9

Collected and edited by Michèle Monte

Although he spent most of his life in Paris, Louis Aragon (1897-1982) maintained deep and multifaceted ties to the Mediterranean world, to which he was linked through his maternal family roots in the Var region and Italy. The symposium held in Toulon in March 2005 shed light on various aspects of Aragon’s poetic and political Mediterranean, shaped by experiences as diverse as his travels to Spain and Italy in the 1920s, his support for the Spanish Republic from 1936 to 1939, his years in Nice and his encounter with Matisse between 1940 and 1942, and his summer stays in Toulon during the 1970s. Arabic-Persian literature and the lyric poetry of Provençal troubadours also left enduring marks on a body of work that continually bridges past and present, identity and otherness, autobiography and the novel. Like a modern Ulysses, Aragon offers us a Mediterranean alive with stories and poems where an individual journey intertwines with collective history.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Michèle MONTE: Foreword: Aragon's ruses or Ulysses the poet - Michel COSTAGUTTO: A brief stroll through Aragon's world in a few stations and without the Stations of the Cross - Suzanne RAVIS: Aragon's Mediterranean: cultural heritage and poetic construction - Daniel BOUGNOUX: Aragon, literally and littorally - Jean ARROUYE: The sea, great cleanser of nightmares - Yves STALLONI: The South and Italy in Le Roman inachevé - Maryse VASSEVIERE: The figure of the Italian in Aragon's novels - Cécile NARJOUX: “In this mirror of Cyprus” or the referential blurring of Cyprus in La Mise à Mort - Hervé BISMUTH: A sumptuous tomb for a late mourning: Aragon and the memory of Federico Garcia Lorca - Pere SOLÀ: The representation of the Spanish Civil War in Aragon's work - Alain-André MORELLO: Fair Provence and hideous province, Sérianne and Manosque, Aragon and Giono - André UGHETTO: Aragon translating Petrarch - Ahmed ISMAÏLI: Stylistic aspects of an Arabic translation of Majnûn - Edouard BEGUIN: The legacy of “Provençal love” in Aragon: the chamber of fables - Mokhtar BELARBI: Sung forms of Arabic poetry in Louis Aragon's Le Fou d'Elsa - Elodie BURLE: Le Fou d'Elsa: a Mediterranean poem?

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Published by the Babel laboratory, UFR Lettres, University of the South Toulon Var, BP 20132
83957 La Garde Cedex.
To order, contact revuebabel@univ-tln.fr tel. 04 94 14 22 85 fax 04 94 14 20 90
Price: 15 € (make checks payable to the accounting officer of the University of the South Toulon Var)

Previously published in the same series:

  • Jean Aicard, from poem to novel, papers edited by Michèle Gorenc (out of print)
  • The Presence of Pierre Caminade, papers edited by Michèle Gorenc
  • Léon Vérane, Philippe Chabaneix and the Fantaisiste School, papers edited by Daniel Aranjo
  • The journal Sud (1970-1996) and contemporary poetic creation, papers edited by Michèle Monte

The volume brings together contributions examining the presence of Southern geographies, cultural heritages, and historical experiences within the writer's poetry and novels. Drawing from family roots, travels, wartime periods, and literary traditions, the collected papers trace how spaces such as Italy, Spain, Provence, and the broader Mediterranean intersect with biographical memory and collective history.

Rooted in French literary studies, scholarly investigations of this nature contribute to understanding the complex relationship between regional geography and cosmopolitan aesthetics in twentieth-century literature. By examining specific literary motifs, translations, and intertextual echoes, such collections place individual oeuvres within broader traditions of lyric poetry and narrative prose. Readers interested in twentieth-century French poetry, the relationship between politics and literature, and the cultural geography of the Mediterranean may find this volume relevant to their inquiries.