Medievalism in a minority language : Frédéric Mistral’s Wish-Fulfillment Provençal Past

Auteurs

  • William Calin

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.18352/relief.884

Mots-clés :

Frédéric Mistral, Occitan, medievalism

Résumé

Frédéric Mistral is the only figure in the Felibrige to have devoted a significant portion of his oeuvre to the Middle Ages. This essay offers a new reading of his two works situated in the Middle Ages – the romance Nerto (1884), and the drama La Rèino Jano (Queen Joanna) (1890). It argues that as a belated Romantic, Mistral repudiates the evils of modernity. His medievalism reflects and gives voice to his own political vision whereby the contemporary situation is displaced into a wish-fulfillment fourteenth century, in which France is conspicuous by its absence.

Biographie de l'auteur

  • William Calin

    William Calin is Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of eleven books and the recipient of the Gilbert Chinard First Literary Prize for 1981; and the American Library Association Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award for 1984 and 1995. His most recent volumes are Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton, and Occitan, 1920-19190; and The Twentieth Century Humanist Critics, from Spitzer to Frye. The Lily and the Thistle:  The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland is in production at the University of Toronto Press.

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Publiée

29-09-2014

Comment citer

Calin, W. (2014) « Medievalism in a minority language : Frédéric Mistral’s Wish-Fulfillment Provençal Past », RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 8(1), p. 48–60. doi:10.18352/relief.884.