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| Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française | |
|---|---|
| Name | Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française |
| Founded | 1911 |
| Founder | André Gide, Jacques Rivière, Jean Schlumberger, Pierre Jean Jouve |
| Country | France |
| Headquarters | Paris |
| Publications | Books, literary reviews |
| Genre | Literature, poetry, essays, criticism |
Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française is a French publishing house founded in 1911 associated with the literary periodical Nouvelle Revue Française and influential in 20th‑century French letters. It played a central role in promoting modernist and avant‑garde writers across Europe and maintained close ties with institutions, journals, and cultural movements in Paris, London, Geneva, and New York. Over its history the house engaged with figures from the Symbolist, Surrealist, Existentialist, and Postwar literary scenes, shaping canon formation through translations, editions, and critical apparatus.
The origin of the publishing house traces to the founding editors of the Nouvelle Revue Française, including André Gide, Jacques Rivière, Jean Schlumberger, and Pierre Jean Jouve, who sought to rival journals like La Revue Blanche and networks around Mercure de France, Émile Zola, and Gustave Flaubert. Early catalogues featured contributors such as Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T. S. Eliot, alongside translations of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. During the interwar years the house published works by André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Blaise Cendrars, positioning itself against publishers like Gallimard, Grasset, Calmann-Lévy, and Plon. Under the occupation of Paris in 1940–1944 the firm navigated censorship and editorial crises involving figures such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robert Brasillach, and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, later confronting postwar debates about collaboration and purges tied to Épuration. The postwar decades saw expansion with authors linked to Albert Camus, Marguerite Yourcenar, Samuel Beckett, Ivo Andrić, and translators associated with Jorge Luis Borges, Federico García Lorca, and Rainer Maria Rilke. From the 1970s through the 1990s the house responded to changes inaugurated by May 1968, engaged with theory from Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and published poets of the generation of Yves Bonnefoy and Seamus Heaney.
Originally organized as a cooperative of editors and shareholders drawn from journal staff including André Gide, the structure evolved amid negotiations with corporate actors such as Groupe Gallimard, Editis, and international financiers tied to Hachette Livre, Random House, and Faber and Faber. Governance featured editorial boards that included literary critics like Georges Bataille, Jean Paulhan, and managers with links to Éditions Gallimard and distributors such as Filippachi and La Hune. Ownership disputes have involved courts in Paris and stakeholders from publishing houses including Grasset and investment groups connected to Bertelsmann and Vivendi. The house maintained editorial independence during many periods but sometimes entered licensing and co‑edition agreements with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Penguin, Einaudi, and Rowohlt Verlag for translation and distribution.
The editorial line emphasized literary modernity, translation, and critical commentary, promoting authors from Symbolism through Surrealism to Existentialism and Postmodernism, and publishing poetry, novels, essays, and critical editions. The catalogue interleaved French authors—Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus—with translated corpus by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Umberto Eco, and Günter Grass. Scholarly apparatus included introductions by Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, and critical series edited with figures such as Jean Starobinski and Jean Ricardou.
Published authors encompassed a wide array of Nobel laureates and major modernists: Sully Prudhomme, Romain Rolland, Gabriel García Márquez, Samuel Beckett, Ivo Andrić, Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, Derek Walcott, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Marguerite Yourcenar, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Blaise Cendrars, Louis‑Ferdinand Céline, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Alain-Fournier, Henri Michaux, Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes.
The house produced scholarly and literary series comparable to Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and collaborated on co‑editions with Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Le Livre de Poche, Folio, Poésie/Gallimard, and international imprints such as Faber and Faber, Einaudi, Suhrkamp, Saggi Mondadori, and Schocken Books. Series included critical editions, collected works, and translation series overseen by editors like Jean Paulhan, Maurice Nadeau, and Pierre Klossowski. The imprint strategy targeted canonical reprints, contemporary fiction, poetry, and literary criticism, licensing rights across markets including United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Argentina.
Controversies included wartime editorial choices involving Louis-Ferdinand Céline and collaborationist accusations tied to Robert Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle, leading to legal and public disputes during the Épuration; libel and contract litigation with authors and heirs—cases invoking courts in Paris and intellectual property claims referenced by Société des gens de lettres and Syndicat national de l'édition; rights disputes over translations of Marcel Proust, André Gide, and posthumous publications contested by estates of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Samuel Beckett; commercial disputes with distributors such as Flammarion and Hachette Livre; and debates over editorial responsibility raised in media outlets like Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération, and France Culture.
The publisher shaped French literary canons and international reception of modern literature, impacting institutions and events including Prix Goncourt, Prix Nobel de littérature, Prix Médicis, Festival d'Avignon, and academic curricula at Sorbonne University, École Normale Supérieure, Collège de France, and libraries such as Bibliothèque nationale de France and British Library. Its authors and editions influenced movements from Symbolism to Surrealism to Existentialism and affected translations, criticism, and pedagogy across Europe and the Americas, resonating in cultural festivals, museums like Musée d'Orsay and Centre Pompidou, and in intellectual debates involving Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes. The imprint remains a touchstone in studies of 20th‑century literature, comparative literature programs at Oxford University, Harvard University, Columbia University, and in archival research at Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine.