Intriguing Recent Addition: 1833 American Francophone journal w/ avant-Romantist work!

La France Littéraire. Vol. I, Year 3. (Undated, c. 1834?) New York. Hardbound Sextodecimo, 320 pp.
 

 

 

A question has tickled the back of my mind for many a year: who of the French Romantics had Edgar A. Poe read, and where did he read them? We know that he was at least aware of an extremist French literary movement with certain affinities to his own work, for the Battle of Hernani is referred to by name in "The Mask of the Red Death", albeit more than a decade after the event. 

   

This extremely rare journal is one possible answer, albeit purely speculative. It was published in New York during Poe's first Baltimore period, when he was first beginning his literary career, and if this issue is any indication it made some of the most experimental French literature of the time – including the gothic-inflected Frenetic Romanticism which is so uncannily in tune with Poe's work of the following decade – available in real-time to francophone American writers and readers.

Though a number of publications have shared this name, I find no record of this one published in new York; the frontispiece gives no information other than the address, "Bureau de la France Littéraire, No. 6 Thames Street" – not even a date, though both topical references and the literary trends reflected therein establish a date in the early to mid 1830s.

 

It contains contemporary poems and stories reprinted from an array of contemporary literary journals, and while its contents are heterogeneous (even including French translation of English texts!), it evinces a distinctly innovative taste, representing a number of obscure avant-garde writers including Émile Saladin (with a Frenetic-Orientalist crossover poem), Alphonse Brot, Elise Moreau, and Léon Gozlan, along with mainstream Romantics like Lamartine, Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. (On the other hand, it also contains an implicitly anti-Romanticist article about the degradation of the tradition of artists' dinners since it was got hold of the Romanticist "orgies".)

Many of these writers were associated with the Romanticist editor Charles Malo, who edited a journal with this same title in France during this time (1832-39), leaving open the possibility that this American magazine was in some indirect way associated with its Parisian namesake, though I have found no direct evidence to this effect.