Auguste Brizeux as a type of romantic singer of local culture

Abstract

The aim of the research is to identify the main features of a creative type embodied in the figure of A. Brizeux. Based on the analysis of the poems “Marie” (1831), “The Bretons” (“Les Bretons”, 1846) and “The Breton Elegy” (“L’Élégie de la Bretagne”, 1857), the paper describes the main features of the artistic world created by the writer, as well as the most significant features of the author’s poetics. The paper is original in that it provides a typological examination of the Breton poet’s creative work, focusing on the analysis of the works on the Breton theme, which was most important to A. Brizeux. This approach significantly differs from a complete description of the writer’s creative heritage (with all the incidental details distracting from the main material) and is closer to a thesaurus-based thematic and content-based limitation in the selection of research material. Such a method brings typical features to the foreground and emphasizes them: Brizeux is not just the “bard of Brittany” (the most widespread and well-established view of the poet), but the “bard of Brittany” who lived in an era dominated by Romantic tastes in literature and, therefore, saw his homeland in a way that poets of other eras could not. As a result of the research, it has been found that A. Brizeux represents, firstly, a type of writer not uncommon for the Romantic era, who actualized interest in local culture (Breton culture) and created a romantically idealized image of the homeland, similar to how Virgil created the most memorable myth of “blessed Arcadia” in the “Bucolics”, and, secondly, a type of writer who simultaneously participated in processes characteristic of different Romantic literary periods: the rethinking of poetic norms and the practical transformation of genres.

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: March 17, 2024.
• Published: April 25, 2024.

Keywords

• Огюст Бризё
• французская романтическая поэзия
• бретонская тема
• мифологизация
• типология романтиков второго ряда
• Auguste Brizeux
• French Romantic poetry
• Breton theme
• mythologization
• typology of secondary Romantics

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