By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. Plutarch effectively invented the genre of biography.
Plutarch’s innovative approach to biography was to take two important figures – one from Greek civilisation and the other from the Roman empire – and compare and contrast their characters, fortunes, and outlooks. This is the basis for his most famous work, the Parallel Lives.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
French literature has often been one step ahead of the literary curve, to risk mixing our progressive metaphors. Before T. S. Eliot and other Anglophone poets had found a way to write about the modern city, Charles Baudelaire had already shown a way forward. In the realm of medieval romance, French writers and troubadours led the way. Gustave Flaubert influenced James Joyce, Henry James, and countless others. So, in this post, we thought we’d pay homage to French literature and Francophone writers by sharing a dozen of our favourite interesting facts about French writers and French literature.
The most popular novel among soldiers in the American Civil War was Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
Georges Perec wrote a novel, La disparition, without once using the letter ‘e’ (apart from four times on the title-page, presumably, when the author’s name is cited).
French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes was killed by a laundry van.
French writer Colette started her working day by picking the fleas off her cat and would write only on blue paper, by artificial light, in her bare feet.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. A novel written by Victorian author Wilkie Collins when he was 20, titled Iolani and set in Tahiti, was eventually published in 1999.
Written in 1844 but not published until 110 years after his death, Iolani: Or, Tahiti as It Was was Collins’s first ever attempt at writing a novel. Collins knew next to nothing about Tahiti, but that didn’t stop him from having a go at writing about it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. John Bunyan’s most famous book has a claim to being the first English novel.
Others have argued that The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Bunyan’s masterpiece, is less a ‘novel’ and more a religious allegory – which it certainly is. Bunyan the book while imprisoned in Bedford gaol (for preaching without a licence and refusing to attend the Anglican church service).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. Vampires began to appear in literature in a big way in the early eighteenth century, as a result of a real-life ‘vampire craze’.
In the 1720s and 1730s, vampires became a big part of European culture, and even included the digging up of a couple of suspected vampires, Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Paole, in Serbia. Following this, there was a 1748 poem The Vampire by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, as well as the narrative poem Lenore (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger.