Born 30 March 1895 to Jean-Antoine Giono, an anarchist shoemaker, and Pauline Pourcin Giono, Jean Giono spent his whole life, apart from holidays and abominated war service, in the small town of Manos...
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Critical Essay by Norma L. Goodrich
[Le Grand Théâtre] falls neither into the category of literary criticism, nor into that of prose fiction. Although it purports ostensibly to be a &#x...
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Critical Essay by Felix Rysten
While Giono [in Naissance de l'Odyssée] tells what "really" happened in legendary Ithaca, he cajoles the reader into a suspension of disbeli...
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Critical Essay by Malcolm Scott
Throughout the period from the publication of Colline in 1929 to that of L'Eau vive in 1943, there are constant references in Giono's writings to the pow...
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In the following essay, Starr points out the obvious influences of Whitman's love of nature and the life-force on the works of Giono.
The influence of Walt Whitman upon certain contemporary ...
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In the following essay, Goodrich states that in Le Moulin de Pologne, Giono was heavily influenced by several Shakespearean tragedies.
In 1952, Jean Giono published Le Moulin de Pologne1, described...
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In the following essay, Goodrich establishes connections between Le Hussard sur le toit, as well as an earlier novel by Giono, and several works by other authors, finding epic and symbolic implication...
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In the following essay, Bieber notes the ways in which Giono's works evoke the ambience of ancient Greece and the style of its epic writers.
Stripped of Greek influences and sources, much of...
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In the following essay, Lawrence examines Giono's antiwar writings during the period before and during World War II.
The political writings of this period are not the result of a sudden impu...
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In the following essay, Scott explores the theme of the healing power of language and music in the early novels of Giono.
The first and most obvious manifestation of Giono's fascination with...
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In the following essay from her full-length study of the “modes” of Giono's writings, Goodrich traces Giono's autobiographical themes, comparing them to those of writers su...
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In the following essay, Madden makes a statistical analysis of the nature of the imagery in La Naissance de l'Odyssée.
Jean Giono's greatest originality as a novelist lies in h...
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In the following excerpt from a study of the use of the pastoral form in several post-World War II French literary figures, Brosman notes the ways in which Giono and poet René Char use pastoral...
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In the following essay, Browning examines the metaphorical uses of the images of the well, the cistern, and the fountain in Giono's Un de Baumugnes.
The well, the cistern, and the fountain r...
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In the following essay, O'Brien presents a feminist, deconstructive reading of Giono's Le chant du monde, countering Giono's own self-criticism that the book did not have a suffic...
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In the following review of the English version of Le Hussard sur le toit, Peyre, one of the first English-language commentators on Giono, notes that Giono's postwar emphasis changed to one of p...
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In the following essay, Kelley presents a close textual reading of Giono's novel Un roi sans divertissement, pointing out semiotic similarities between the processes of murder or suicide and th...
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In following essay, Peyre summarizes Giono's work and its changing emphases during the author's lifetime.
Historians and philosophers, with their faculty for proposing impressive gene...
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In the following excerpt from their full-length study of contemporary French novelists, Brée and Guiton note that Giono is unlike most of his literary contemporaries in his preference for isola...
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In the following essay, de Pomerai argues that one of Giono's last published works is an allegory for war and a condemnation of violence.
The case of Jean Giono is probably unique—tha...
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In the following essay, Goodrich examines the role of the narrator, the technical skill of Giono, and the use of history, fantasy, and mythology in Le Moulin de Pologne.
In 1952 Jean Giono publishe...
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In the following essay, Kay compares Giono's and D. H. Lawrence's approaches to the Dionysian themes of death and rebirth.
The cult of Dionysus involves two closely related elements: ...
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In the following chapter from his full-length biographical-critical study of Giono, Smith analyzes the 1933 novel Le Serpent d'étoiles and the three mid-1930s novels of the Pan Trilogy&#...
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In the following essay, Goodrich explores the role of bachelors in fiction in Giono's and others' work, concentrating on a comparison between Les Grands Chemins and John Steinbeck'...
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Jean Giono
Critical Essay by Norma L. Goodrich
