Alain-Fournier

real name Henri-Alban Fournier. 1886--1914, French novelist; author of Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; translated as The Lost Domain, 1959)

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Alain-Fournier

(pseudonym of Henri Fournier). Born Oct. 30, 1886, in La Chapelle d’Angillon; died Sept. 22, 1914, at Eparge, Near Verdun. French writer. Died at the front at the beginning of World War I. Author of verses, essays, short stories, which were collected in the book Miracles (1924).

The only large finished work of Alain-Fournier is the novel Le Grand Meaulnes (1913). Written in a lyric manner—as reminiscences of the childhood years, schooling, games, and thoughts of adolescents—the novel combines a tense, dynamic plot and romantic intrigue with the realistic portrayal of French provincial life. The traditional “story of a young man” in bourgeois society is revealed by Alain-Fournier in a democratic spirit.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Bol’shoi Mol’n. Moscow, 1960. (Introduction by L. Zonina.)

REFERENCES

Borgal, C. Alain-Fournier. Paris, [1956].
Delettrez, J. M. Alain-Fournier et Le Grand Meaulnes. Paris, [1954].
Bruzeau, M. “Dans la chambre du Grand Meaulnes.” Europe, 1961. Feb.-Mar., nos. 382–383.
Dédéyan, C. Alain-Fournier et la réalité secrete. Paris, 1967.

M. N. VAKSMAKHER

Mentioned in

France

References in periodicals archive

Author and garden expert Alan Titchmarsh and, inset, Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Estate) by Alain-Fournier which he will be reading this summer

Summer reads of the star writers; You may be picking up the new novel by your favourite bestselling writer this summer, but what will they be poring over? Hannah Stephenson takes a sneak peak at some top authors' holiday reading lists PROFILE

Published in 1913, Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes had long occupied a ringside seat on my many lists of books to read, and a spot on my bookshelf.

Beckoned by the Mysteries of Meaulnes

The lost world of Allende's socialist Chile is a mere figment of memory, recoverable only through storytelling, much like the ghost villa, the characters in Alain-Fournier's novel, and a wrecked ship that is introduced in the opening scene and never mentioned again.

The Lost Domain

After a curious chapter focusing on the redemptive figure of the thyrsus in Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Wagner, part two of the study examines literary texts with chapters on Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes as a kind of immature precursor of Modernism, and on variations on the uncanny as a central theme in Proust and Kafka, Conrad and Gide, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny

This, his second novel to be published in Germany, belongs to the genre of memories of times past, of youth, and is faintly reminiscent, for example, of Alain-Fournier's classic Le Grand Meaulnes.

Zwanzig und ein Tag

The hero, an idealistic but forceful schoolboy, runs away and at a children's party in a decrepit country house meets a beautiful girl--whose prototype Alain-Fournier had met in 1905.

Alain-Fournier

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (translated as The Lost Estate but first published in France in 1913) We read this for French A level and it sums up my sixth form.

Stories that inspired a novel life; READERS' LIVES

Reverberations of Baudelaire, references to Don Quixote, Alain-Fournier, Riviere, Camus, only hint at the fertile depths beneath this work.

So Vast the Prison

His scholarly publications include the two-volume Creaculture (1971), essays on comparative culture, and Structure intentionnelle du `Grand Meaulnes': vers le poeme romance (1976; "Intentional Structure of `Grand Meaulnes': Toward the Poetic Novel"), a book of literary criticism on Alain-Fournier. Bouraoui also published several volumes of French poetry: Musocktail (1966), Tremble(1969; "Wavy"), Eclate module(1972; "Modulated Explosion"), Vesuviade(1976), Vers et l'envers (1982; "Verse and the Reverse"), Arc-en-terre (1991), and Emigressence (1992).

Bouraoui, Hedi (Andre)

Fowles is particularly strong on the psychology of authorship, which he theorizes, in essays on Hardy and Alain-Fournier, as the compulsive reworking of an abiding sense of loss (with a nod at the psychoanalytical critic Gilbert J.

Wormholes Essays and Occasional Writings