Maupassant's Travel Writing:
Sur l'eau[
Afloat],
Au soleil[
Under the Sun] and
La Vie errante[
The Wandering Life]
Nineteenth-century French writers (Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, Flaubert in his letters) had frequently used a Mediterranean journey as material for a travel narrative. Always keen to maximise the profit from his writings, Maupassant exploited the journeys he made – for pleasure or for medical reasons as well as on journalistic missions – notably those to the Mediterranean: the South of France, Italy and Sicily, North Africa. These provided material for newspaper articles, later reworked in book form. The final book version is often misleadingly presented: Sur l'eau (the most extreme case) claims to be a day-by-day record of “what I saw and what I thought” made by
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Citation: Cogman, Peter. "Sur l'eau". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 May 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12359, accessed 14 December 2024.]