Guy de Maupassant, from author to critic of french naturalism

Abstract

Guy de Maupassant’s (1850-1893) works present characteristic elements of the literature made at the end of the 19th century, proposing variations of the realist and naturalist styles. Well-known in Zola’s (1840-1902) circles, one of the most representative novelists of literary Naturalism, Maupassant also kept in touch with other important masters of the French Realism, and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was one of them. Among verse, drama, and novel, the short stories and the novellas predominate over the Norman writer’s works, which paint with either impressionist or realist colors the bourgeois and the decadent scene of the last quarter of the century in Paris, Normandy and its neighborhood. Once Maupassant had not put aside the reflections on the moment and theoretical aspects, such as the artistic production of his time and his contemporaries, his varied works represent an important discussion about the historic and literary categories of that time.