The Sea In French Literature Before20^th Century

The sea-mysterious, haunting but gorgeous, imaginative-inspires all writers whether in ancient times and modern times and triggers their minds. Since the very beginning of human civilization, although the sea is always the aesthetic object of literature, yet the sea image in French literature did not emerge until the middle ages. Since then, the sea provides a wide space for the French writers to show their imagination and endows them endless source of inspiration.The sea is the symbol of vast and grand space; however, it is also the symbol of horrible and almighty force. During a long period, the sea is regarded as a hostile and dangerous existing:in the ancient times, people lacked knowledge and regarded it as an evidence of God’s anger and a bottomless abyss full of monsters; in the middle ages, people started to know the sea with the increase of oceangoing voyage, however storms and monsters existed everywhere; during the Renaissance, the writers revealed their progress in geography and oceanography through their works, yet, in people’s mind, the sea was still changeable and unpredictable.During the19th century, the ideology in the whole continent of Europe had reshaped by the elite. Just during this historical period, ocean literature in France was flouring as never before. From Jules Michelet to Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire to Jules Verne, writers started to look upon the sea in different perspectives:the sea was not regarded as an alien force no longer, but a symbol of human spirit through writers’ideas and beliefs whether reflected by themselves or the whole human beings.This paper, regarding the sea as a literary aesthetic image, aims at studying the changes of ocean image in French literature before20th Century through human beings’endless efforts to know and conquer the sea, therefore analyzing the evolution of human beings’living conditions, relationship between the sea and human beings and people’s way of thinking in Aesthetics and Ethics.