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Victor Segalen (January 14, 1878 - May 21, 1919) was a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic.

He was born in Brest. He studied naval medicine in Bordeaux. He traveled and lived in Polynesia (1903-1905) and China (1909-1914 and 1917). He died by accident in a forest in Huelgoat, France ('under mysterious circumstances' and reputedly with an open copy of Hamlet by his side).

He gave his name to the Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2 University of literature and social sciences in Bordeaux.

[edit] Works include

• A dreuz an Arvor (1899)
• L'observation médicale chez les écrivains naturalistes (Thesis, Bordeaux, 1901)
• Les Immémoriaux (under the pseudonym Max Anély) (1907)
• Stèles (prose poems, 1912)
• Peintures (1916)

Posthumous publications:

• Orphée-Roi (1921)
• René Leys (1922)
• Mission archéologique en Chine (in collaboration with Gilbert de Voisins and Jean Lartigue) (1923-1924)
• Équipée. De Pékin aux marches thibétaines (1929)
• Voyage au pays du réel (1929)
• Lettres de Chine (1967)
• La Grande Statuaire chinoise (1972)
• Journal des îles (1978)
• Le Fils du ciel : chronique des jours souverains (1985)

[edit] Works about Segalen

• Henry Bouillier: Victor Segalen (Mercure de France, 1961)
• Gilles Manceron: Segalen
• Charles Forsdick: Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity (Oxford University Press, 2000)

[edit] External links

• Stèles 古今碑錄 (complete French text and online book of Chinese sources)
• Website about Victor Segalen (in French)
• Bibliography on Victor Segalen (in French)

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