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Unanimism and the Novels of Jules Romains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Felix Walter
Felix Walter*
Affiliation:
Trinity College University of Toronto
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Extract

The present article is in part a corollary to an earlier one on Populism and a further chapter in an exploration into that complex movement in the contemporary French novel which is in revolt against nineteenth-century individualism and all the involved subjectivisms, the affected preciosity and even the dishevelled formlessness of the “littérature snob.” The branch of the movement I propose to discuss is sometimes referred to by critics as a new classicism, and though the term is misleading it can stand. Jules Romains himself expresses the sense of cleavage between two literatures when he says: Je crois … qu'un peu partout une certaine période de littérature coupée du réel, tournée avec trop de complaisance vers l‘étude d‘états dâmes fragiles, infiniment particuliers et périssables est en train de se clore.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1936 , pp. 863 - 871
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 PMLA, xlix (1934), 356–364.

2 F. Lefèvre: Une heure avec … vi, 246.

3 From an article first published in the Anthologie de la Nouvelle Prose Française (1926), pp. 257–258.

4 Suicide (1897), p. 362.

5 A selected bibliography of Unanimism would include: Madeleine Israël's hagiography, Jules Romains, sa vie et sou œuvre; F. Lefèvre's interview already quoted; the joint introduction to Chennevière's Œuvres poètiques by André Cuisinier and René Maublanc; Marcel Thiébault's lengthy review of the first six volumes of Les Hommes de bonne volonté in the Revue de Paris (Jan. 15, 1934); René Lalou's article in the same review (Nov. 1, 1934); and, among the manuals, Benjamin Crémieux' XXe Siècle, André Billy's Littérature Française Contemporaine, the work with the same title of Christian Sénéchal, and, most recently, Cuisenier's Jules Romains et l'Unanisme.

6 Manuel de Déification (1910).

7 Particularly Duhamel, Arcos and Vildrac.

8 Cf., in La Vie Unanime, poems such as Mais, au fond du corps, les cellules, Rien ne cesse d'être intérieur, Unanime, je t'aime, etc.

9 See note 5.

10 M. René Lalou.

11 F. Lefèvre, op. cit., p. 245.