![]() Shakespeare has been a matter of controversy in France ever since he first wrote his plays. Both England and France have also been a haven for French or British exiles - Oscar Wilde came to live in Paris after his release from prison, although he was not particularly well welcomed there Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud fled to London for their short-lived yet passionate affair. ![]() Later on, Jules Verne’s Fantastic Adventures often pair up British and French characters for the sake of characterization (Phileas Fogg and Passe-Partout in Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours - ‘Around the World in Eighty Days ’) or simply of comic relief (the rival-bound but inseparable journalists Alcide Jolivet and Harry Blount in Michel Strogoff ). Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution remains to this day one of the main works of non-fiction ever written on the subject, and The Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel is the greatest Franco-British romance ever set in that era. London and Paris have long been compared, the one as the first city of greatest economic strength and industrial power, the other as the artistic and elegant European capital: they are portrayed as such in Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris and Paul Féval’s Mysteries of London, more famously in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, being a painting of both towns during the French Revolution. The love-hate bond they share is implicit as well as explicit in too many novels, poems and works of fiction and nonfiction to count - sometimes as exacting elements of the plot and/or characterization, sometimes as mere casual comments that denote the strong familiarity of neighbors and rivals: several examples, however, stand out in Anglo-French literary history, and are worth a mention. … In literature as in every other matter, Britain and France have been each other’s best and worst mirror image - to the point that their conflicted but fascinated relationship became a common issue to every sort of work concerning them both, and that they each became each other’s harshest and best critic. Excerpt from Francis Bonnefoy’s master thesis on Britain and France: Narcissus’ reflection in a stormy sea (re-revised title)
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