Charles Sorel

Sorel, Charles 

Born 1602 in Paris; died there Mar. 7,1674. French writer.

Sorel’s first published work was the narrative poem Epithalamium (1616), which contained lines of topical verse. He published several précieux chivalric novels, including The Love Story of Cléagenor and Doristea (1621). The Comic Story of Francion (books 1–12, 1622–33), written in the style of 16th- and 17th-century Spanish picaresque novels, brought Sorel fame and was the first French freethinking novel of everyday life.

Sorel’s witty parody of the pastoral novel, The Extravagant Shepherd (1627–28), written in imitation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, rejected the aesthetics of the literature of preciosity. Sorel also wrote The History of the French Monarchy (1632).

WORKS

Oeuvres diverses. Paris, 1663.
In Russian translation:
Pravdivoe komicheskoe zhizneopisanie Fransiona. [Moscow-Leningrad] 1935.

REFERENCES

¡storiia frantsuzskoi literatury, vol. 1. Moscow-Leningrad, 1946. Pages 384–91.
Reynier, G. Le Roman réaliste au XVII siècle. Paris, 1914.

V. S. LOZOVETSKII