French Classics
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers new to French classics who want an English-language overview
- Literature lovers seeking an older reading guide to map out their reading
- Students in comparative literature or English literature courses who need supplementary material
- General readers who prefer discursive essays over purely academic monographs
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking current academic perspectives or detailed textual analysis
- Readers who want to read the original French classics directly
- Those uncomfortable with the English critical style of the 19th and early 20th centuries
Reading tips
- Start with the table of contents and mark chapters on authors you know or find interesting to read first.
- After each chapter, note the works the author recommends to build your own extended reading list.
- Compare the book's evaluations with contemporary literary histories and note the author's preferences.
- Use it as a reference book: return to the relevant chapter when you encounter a specific French work.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
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- 3
- 4
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- 9
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FAQ
Does this book include excerpts from the original French classics?
Can I understand it without any background in French literature?
Are the book's views still applicable today?
Comments
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About the author
William Cleaver Wilkinson (1833–1920) was an American Baptist minister, professor of literature and writer, born in Westford, Vermont, and a former professor of poetry and criticism at the University of Chicago. Trained both in the ministry and in the academy, he wrote chiefly on religious figures and classic literature. His epic poems The Epic of Saul, The Epic of Paul and The Epic of Moses draw on biblical figures, setting out their lives and spiritual journeys in verse; dignified in tone and dense in narrative, they reflect the taste of nineteenth-century American religious poetry. He also compiled language and literature guides, including a classic French course and a classic German course in English, as well as French Classics, introducing European literature to English-speaking readers for both teaching and general use. Other details of his life are limited in publicly available sources.
