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

Author(s)

  • William Calin

DOI:

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

Keywords:

Frédéric Mistral, Occitan, medievalism

Abstract

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.

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Author Biography

  • 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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Published

2014-09-29

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Speaking of the medieval today: French and Francophone medievalisms

Section

Articles - thematic dossier

License

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

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