Summary
Highlights
The 19th century in France was a rich period for literature, with the novel becoming the dominant genre. Characteristics like third-person narration, an omniscient narrator, detailed settings, and complex character psychology emerged around 1830. Alongside the novel, the short story (nouvelle) also gained prominence, championed by authors like Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Stendhal.
A nouvelle is a brief narrative, ranging from a few dozen lines to several pages. Its key features include a limited number of characters, a condensed spatiotemporal setting, an plot focused on a single event or a significant moment in a character's life, and often a surprising ending known as a 'chute'. Facilitated by the rise of the press, the nouvelle was popular, with many great 19th-century authors experimenting with realistic and fantastic short stories.
Realism, a literary movement led by writers like Balzac and Flaubert from the 1830s, is also a narrative tone. Its aim is to portray reality as it is, without embellishment, focusing on authenticity. Realist novels feature plausible settings and offer precise depictions of social classes, professions, fashions, and customs. The characters are no longer exclusively aristocratic or bourgeois, but can be workers, peasants, convicts, prostitutes, cowards, or unscrupulous opportunists.
While realism and the fantastic may seem opposed, the fantastic relies on realism. The fantastic is a literary tone where supernatural elements or unexplained phenomena emerge within a precisely realistic setting. Its purpose is to create unease, fear, and, most importantly, doubt in the reader's mind. The ambiguous nature of whether events are real or imagined, rational or irrational, is central to the fantastic, with a truly fantastic ending leaving the reader in a state of doubt.