Centre for Reformation and
Renaissance Studies
and the
Centre d’études du 19e siècle français
/ Centre for 19th Century French Studies
SESSION 6A
Interpreting the Renaissance
Martin A. RUEHL, Cambridge University
Before Burckhardt: German Debates about the Renaissance, 1780-1860
This paper investigates the changing representations of the Italian Renaissance
in German belles lettres before the publication of Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur
der Renaissance in Italien (1860). Burckhardt's book has been extraordinarily
influential and the way we think about the Renaissance today, in may ways,
is still indebted to his portrait of the Quattrocento, as a new, secular,
individualist age --"the model of modernity". Burckhardt's
stimulating genealogy of modernity, however, has itself a very rich genealogy
that has hardly been examined up to now. Buckhardt's account of the
Renaissance was curiously indebted to Heinse as well as Goethe. Like
Heinse, he viewed the emancipation of the individual in the Renaissance
as an essentially agonistic, violent and immoral process. Significantly,
he singled out the tyrant as the quintessential Renaissance Man.
At the same time, he followed Goethe in emphasizing the restraining force
that the classical model exerted on this process of individuation.
The final product was a fully "ausgebildet" personality -- however,
one without a genuinely "sittlich" dimension. Ultimately, this amounted
to an important re-definition of Humboldt's and Schiller's neo-humanist
notion of the autonomous individual and marked a crucial transformation
in the bourgeois discouse of Bildung.
Alan KAHAN, Florida International University
Burckhardt and Sismondi: Two Liberals, Two Italian Renaissances
This paper discusses how two influential liberals appropriated the Italian
Renaissance for their very different variants of the liberal program. For
Sismondi, himself an optimist and a nationalist, the Italian Renaissance
was the sad story of the destruction of Italian freedom and independence.
For Burckhardt, neither optimist nor nationalist, the Italian Renaissance
was paradoxically the story of the creation of modern freedom, although
this freedom was not an unadulterated good in his eyes. Oddly enough,
the optimistic and nationalistic twentieth century found Burckhardt's Renaissance
more to its liking, for reasons that again say more about us than about
the Renaissance.
Christine BOLUS-REICHERT, University of Toronto
Mixed Situations": Paterian Eclecticism and the Idea of the Renaissance
In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater attends
to a series of "mixed situations" in which the human spirit leaps forward
to the promise of novel sensations. Paters principle of selection,
if it might be called that, depends on locating those moments of Renaissance
that emerge when the artist casts the peculiar or "mixed" light of his
personality over his creation. As Pater tells his readers in the
Preface, he aims "to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts,
the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life
or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to
indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions
it is experienced" (xx-xxi). The passage recalls the process by which
the early-nineteenth-century French Eclectics such as Victor Cousin hoped
to recover and synthesize the truth from all the various systems of philosophy
that had existed throughout time--but with a crucial difference that makes
Pater a new kind of Eclectic. Instead of attempting a totalizing
eclecticism that would encompass the best thoughts and aspirations of humanity
(such as Cousin or Matthew Arnold might have done), Pater abandons that
line of inquiry for a personal eclecticism, asking, what is this work of
art to me? Eclecticism remains for Pater what it was for Cousin and Arnold,
a method of study and discovery; but it is no longer a philosophy.
Indeed, I want to argue that Pater's eclecticism has more in common with
the "juste milieu," the praxis of nineteenth-century culture, than it does
with any effort to establish a criterion of truth by which one might judge
the productions of the past. In the character of the dilettante,
he makes a claim on our attention, as perhaps having found the way forward
in the arts. While Balzac and others sensed the possibility of progress
through eclecticism, Pater assumes it. In this way, he overcomes
at once the Victorian dilemma of style and the anxiety of being eclectic.
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SESSION 6B
The Poet's Perspective
Robert MELANÇON, Université
de Montréal
Du Bellay, de Sainte-Beuve à Petit de Julleville
Avec le Tableau de la poesie francaise au XVIe siècle commence,
en France, la reinvention de la Renaissance. Sainte-Beuve y esquisse, des
1828, un ensemble de themes qui seront repris et amplifies tout au long
du XIXe siecle et qui, relayes par les premiers travaux universitaires
autour de 1900, informeront jusqu'a une date recente les etudes seiziemistes.
On examinera la consolidation progressive de l'image de Du Bellay, notamment
dans les deux articles que Sainte-Beuve lui consacrera en1840 et 1867,
dans l'edition de ses oeuvres par Charles Marty-Laveaux (1866-1867), enfin
dans L'Histoire de la langue et de la litterature francaise sous la direction
de Petit de Juleville (1896-1900) et dans la these d'Henri Chamard (1900).
Ces derniers travaux ont donne a des themes qui s'etaient esquisses au
temps du Romantisme la caution "scientifique" de l'universite sans les
modifier sensiblement. On se propose ainsi de retracer la genealogie d'une
figure de Du Bellay en precurseur et cousin de Lamartine et de Musset,
qui a longtemps fait obstacle a la lecture de son oeuvre.
Sandra PARMEGIANI, University of Toronto
Ugo Foscolo and the Renaissance: A Modern Perspective
In this paper I will examine Foscolo’s perception of the Renaissance through
his writings on some of the main Italian Renaissance literary and political
figures. Foscolo writes his portrait of Machiavelli as a polemic answer
to Angelo Ridolfi‘s Pensieri intorno allo scopo di Nicolò Machiavelli
nel libro del Principe. His text is an in depth analysis of Machiavelli’s
life, his literary works and the critical history of his writings. Foscolo
views the Italian thinker as the moral interpreter of the Florentine Republic
as well as a writer able to address Foscolo’s contemporaries in early 19th
century Italy. Foscolo’s personal rediscovery of Machiavelli leads often
to an identification with the Renaissance
writer. In his brief history of the Italian sonnet, Foscolo is
particularly interested in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s idea of love. He quotes
by heart a long passage of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s thoughts on this subject.
Foscolo ends up presenting to the readers a small treatise on love, which
allows a comparison between the Renaissance idea of this commanding force
and its Pre-romantic discernment. Finally, in his description of the literary
eras of Italian Language and Literature, Foscolo looks at the Renaissance
once more through a portrait of its main writers and thinkers. Lorenzo
il Magnifico, Poliziano, Savonarola and Machiavelli, emerge form his description
as modern Romantic figures, artists and moralists who shaped the Italian
literary and spiritual Renaissance. In Foscolo’s words, they are head and
shoulders above the society in which they lived, surpassing its theological,
philosophical and philological limitations.
Hal and Luci Fortunato De Lisle, Bridgewater
State College
Locus amoenus: The garden in Coleridge and Boccaccio
Coleridge's "The Garden of Baccaccio" provides a rich and complex example
of an early 19th century use of a major Italian Renaissance text-- Boccaccio's
Decameron, specifically the description of the garden in Day three of the
frame. The complexity is enhanced because Coleridge's poem deals
not directly with Boccaccio's description but is mediated through an engraving
of the garden by Augustus Fox after an illustration by Thomas Stothard,
both contemporaries of Coleridge. Thus we have not only Coleridge's
perspective but also the perspective of two visual artists. Analysis
of the poem reveals at least two major points related directly to the Renaissance.
First, the narrative structure of Coleridge's poem can be seen to follow
the Renaissance understanding of melancholia which bears directly upon
creative motivation in response to art. The poet in his despondency
laments his loss of imaginative sensibility but through a response to art,
which recalls medieval visual aesthetic theories of intromission and extromission,
his mind moves first into the garden transcendently, then withdraws from
it with his creative powers restored. Second, creative imagination
in Boccaccio, in Stothard/Fox, and in Coleridge is conveyed through a shared
Renaissance and Romantic topos, the garden, which, while appearing natural,
is more truly the product of artifice. Quite differently, however,
Boccaccio's description of the garden draws the reader into the scene to
suggest the harmony of man's art in cooperation with nature, whereas Coleridge's
enthusiastic response to the Stothard/Fox sentimental conflation of Boccaccio
reveals less the garden and invites the reader into the consciousness of
the poet to witness and share the exuberance of his crfeative response
to the scene.
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SESSION 7A
Re-USING FRENCH HISTORY
François-Emmanuël BOUCHER, McGill
University
Le début de la fin: le rôle de la Renaissance
dans l'historiographie de la première moitié du XIXe siècle
Contrairement aux encyclopédistes et aux philosophes qui précèdent
la Révolution française, les romantiques et les réactionnaires
chrétiens de la première moitié du XIXe siècle
seront profondément hostiles à la Renaissance. En vue de
comprendre ce que Chateaubriand appelle le «naufrage de l’ancien
monde», les Lamennais, les Hugo, les Saint-Simon, les Leroux et les
Monseigneur Gaume, développent une matrice herméneutique
à partir de laquelle ils essaieront de donner un sens aux malheur
de leur époque. Le seizième siècle joue un rôle
crucial dans leur analyse. Époque de troubles et de transformations,
la Renaissance européenne se distingue surtout par l’avènement
du protestantisme et par le retour à la philosophie païenne.
Comme je tenterai de l’expliquer lors de ma communication, c’est en suivant
les conséquences des événements qui sont issus de
cette période que l’on essaiera de montrer comment la France, en
s’éloignant peu à peu du catholicisme romain, n’a pu faire
autrement que s’embourber dans un mélange épouvantable de
barbarie et de débauche qui trouveront leur apogée pendant
la période de la Terreur. En substituant la raison à l’autorité
de l’Église et en vouant un culte à des héros et à
des philosophes impies, les français n’ont pas seulement commis
une erreur face à la tradition chrétienne mais aussi face
à l’histoire qui, par le biais de la Révolution, leur montrera
que les doctrines qui apparaissent avec la Renaissance étaient vouées,
d’une manière ou d’une autre, à détruire l’ensemble
de la civilisation.
Michelle TROIZIER-CHEYNE, Rutgers University
Neutralizing the Other: 19th-Century French Accounts of the Saint
Barthélemy
This paper explores 19th-century French attempts to cope with the specter
of alterity by examining an interdisciplinary corpus of texts centered
on the Saint Barthélemy, the savage 1572 attempt to neutralize the
religious Other in Renaissance France. The wide variety of 19th-century
source material, which includes Dumas La Reine Margot, Merimée,
Chronique du règne de Charles IX, Scribe Les Hugenots, a series
of theatrical parodies lampooning La Reine Margot, censor reports, newspaper
reviews and a cross-section of historical accounts of the massacre, highlights
the preoccupation with and anxiety over the codification of a narrative
of the "Saint Barthélemy" as a national rather than religious event
within 19th-century public imagination and memory. My paper focuses first
on how these texts figure alterity and resolve the issue of difference
structurally within a national narrative and second on how contemporaneous
critical assessments of these texts problematize the issue of discursive
authority.
Paule PETITIER, Université François
Rabelais
Michelet et la mélancolie de la Renaissance
Comme l'a montré Lucien Febvre, le rôle de Michelet dans l'invention
de la Renaissance a été essentiel. Son retour sur cette période
au début du Second Empire, après l'achèvement de l'Histoire
de la Révolution, exprime ses doutes sur la possibilité d'un
accomplissement de l'histoire. La Renaissance lui permet d'évoquer
à nouveau un des moments-pivots de la civilisation européenne
et de réfléchir à la dynamique révolutionnaire.
En elle cependant s'inscrit déjà l'ajournement sine die de
la réalisation de la Révolution. Cela place la Renaissance
sous le signe de la mélancolie. Les grands génies de cette
époque, Michel-Ange, Dürer... sont vus par l'historien comme
des êtres au destin incomplet, souffrant d'une mutilation qui tient
essentiellement aux contradictions et aux blocages de leur époque.
Une lecture induite par la crise de la conscience politique du milieu du
XIXe siècle se trouve mettre en lumière l'une des catégories
à travers lesquelles se sont pensés les hommes de la Renaissance
: la mélancolie. C'est cette rencontre entre mélancolie du
XIXe
siècle et mélancolie du XVIe siècle que nous voudrions
étudier.
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SESSION 7B:
The Novelist's Perspective
Michel BRIX, Université de Notre-Dame de
la Paix
Balzac et l'heritage de Rabelais
On a souvent établi des parallèles entre le XVIe et le XIXe
siecle. Ainsi les romantiques semblent avoir puisé dans la pensée
néo-platonicienne de la Renaissance une part majeure de leur inspiration.
Plus d'un élément rapprochait d'ailleurs, en 1820, les
Méditations poétiques de Lamartine des oeuvres des
poètes du XVIe siècle : le thème de l'amour pétrarquisant,
le culte rendu au génie inspirateur et à l'Art, l'assimilation
de la poesie à la voix de Dieu, la sacralisation du poète,
enfin les allusions aux correspondances verticales faisant du monde d'en
bas l'image hiéroglyphique du monde d'en haut, - bref toutes données
esthétiques et intellectuelles issues de la pensée platonicienne,
ou néo-platonicienne. Dans ce contexte, il est intéressant
de constater que, lorsqu'il annonce la publication de La Peau de chagrin,
Balzac désigne Rabelais comme son maître. Est-ce seulement
de la liberté verbale voire de la bouffonnerie de l'auteur de Pantagruel
que Balzac se réclame? Ou faut-il voir dans cette référence
l'affirmation de quelque chose de plus profond? Et qu'en est-il du
néoplatonisme de Balzac? A-t-il quelque rapport avec le point
de vue de Rabelais sur le néo-platonisme du XVIe siècle ?
Ce sont àa les questions que nous voudrions examiner.
Kristen LAAKSO DIDIER, University of Southern
California
Marguerite de Valois and La Reine Margot
Alexandre Dumas' novel, La Reine Margot, was published for the 1st time
in 1845. By 1860 fifteen new editions had already been printed. Marguerite
de Valois (1553-1615), queen of France and Navarre, was the inspiration
for this book that has remained popular through modern times. Dumas' novel
was only one of many 19th works of art inspired by this notorious queen,
she is also featured in songs, poems and operas (Le Pré au Clercs
by Ferdinand Hérold, Livret by Planard and Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer
and Scribe), in the Chronique du règne de Charles IX by Merimée
and in Le Rouge et Le Noir by Stendhal. Marguerite de Valois' own version
of her life, her Mémoires (written in 1594, first published in 1628)
were included in important collections of memoirs compiled and published
in 1823, 1836 and 1842. Her Mémoires include one of very few
eye witness accounts of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and therefore
were an essential source for Michelet's Histoire de la France as well.
My paper will explore the many different faces of Marguerite de Valois
in 19th century French culture. In fiction, history and her own personal
account De Valois is depicted as everything from a frivolous queen to an
erudite literary patron. These contrasts and contradictions are a
solid point of departure for examining the 19th century's renewed interest
in the Renaissance.
Lucia MANEA, Université Laval
Le pèlerinage de saint Flaubert aux pays de Bosch et de Bruegel
L'intérêt du XIXe siècle pour les "anciennes et singulières
productions" de Bosch et des deux Bruegel, le Drôle et son fils surnommé
d'Enfer, était signalé en 1857 par Baudelaire (Curiosités
esthétiques). Rien d'étonnant donc dans la fascination qu'éprouve
Flaubert pour ce genre d'œuvres qui auraient pu jouer le rôle de
germe de ses Tentations de saint Antoine (1849, 1856 et 1874). Partant
de l'idée que l'imaginaire se forme dans l'entre-deux des textes
et des tableaux, et de la constatation du renouement du XIXe siècle
avec une forme d'imagination que la Renaissance avait connue, nous nous
proposons de déceler l'emprise de l'iconographie renaissante et
de l'esthétique de l'âge moderne dans la genèse romanesque
des Tentations.
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SESSION 8A
Recovering the Renaissance Book
April OETTINGER, University of Delaware
William Morris's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
This paper explores an episode from the 19th-century afterlife of the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili and the book's role in shaping the modern concept of the Renaissance.
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, to whom Morris gave his own copy
of the 1499 Aldine, count among the illustrious 19th-century owners of
the Polifilo. My paper will address Morris and Burne-Jones' annotated copy
of the Polifilo, and the ways in which this Renaissance romance exerted
an influence on the graceful interplay between word and image in Burne-Jones
woodcut illustrations for Morris A Dream of John Ball and The Story of
Cupid and Psyche from The Earthly Paradise.
Diana COOPER-RICHET, Université de Versailles
Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
La redécouverte des éditions aldines au XIXe siècle.
Antoine Augustin Renouard, bibliophile et collectionneur
La Révolution française amène sur le marché
du livre de très nombreux ouvrages anciens, provenant de bibliothèques
religieuses ou artistocratiques. Les bibliophiles d'Ancien Régime,
amoureux de rareté, sont remplacés au début du XIXe
siècle, par des érudits comme Antoine Augustin Renouard,Charles
Nodier our Jacques Charles Brunet, qui seront à l'origine d'un renouvellement
de la bibliophilie, discipline à laquelle ils donnent ses lettres
de noblesse. Rassemblant avec méthode les meilleures éditions
de la Renaissance, ils offrent à un public grandissant d'amateurs,
grâce aux instruments bibliographiques qu'ils compilent, une lecture
critique des oeuvres du XVIe siècle. Cette communication se
propose d'analyser, à travers l'exemple exceptionnel et encore très
mal connu du libraire parisien Renouard, les raisons et les formes de l'intérêt
porté, dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle,
aux travaux d'imprimerie et d'édition de la Renaissance. Savant
très respecté de ses pairs et dont les travaux font toujours
référence, Renouard a sans doute été le plus
grand collectionneur et le meilleur connaisseur des éditions aldines.
Dylan REID, University of Toronto
Local Printing, Local Pride: Rouen's 19th century Bibliophiles
and the Renaissance Printing Industry
The antiquaries and archivists of 19th-century Rouen were fascinated by
Rouen's past as a centre of Renaissance book publishing. Their fascination
was revealed in numerous studies of the city's printing past by local researchers,
and it took concrete form in two societies: the Société
des bibliophiles normands and the Société rouennaise des
bibliophiles. These two organizations of book-lovers sponsored and
implemented the reprinting of numerous editions originally published in
16th-century Rouen, in particular books written by its citizens or dealing
with the city itself. In this paper, I will explore the interest
of local antiquaries and historians of the 19th century in Rouen's Renaissance
printing industry: what they were interested in, why, how they approached
it, and how their approach was developed and refined over the course of
the century.
Marie KOREY, University of Toronto
Perfecting the Historical Record: The Antiquarian Interests
of Henry Shaw
Henry Shaw (1800-1873) was an architectural draughtsman, engraver, illuminator,
and antiquary who produced several books documenting the decorative arts
of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This paper will focus on his
use of developments in printing technology reproduce decorations and illuminations
from medieval and renaissance manuscripts and early printed books.
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SESSION 8B
Theoretical Approaches to Renaissance
Literature
Christopher WARLEY, Oakland University
Sidney Lee and the Institutionalization of the Renaissance Sonnet
Sequence
For at least a hundred years, sonnet sequences have been an integral component
in the institutionalization of the Renaissance. Indeed, the language
of sonnet sequence has been such a primary shaping force in depictions
of the period—governing ideas about court, sexuality, class, religion,
and subject formation generally—that the question "what is the Renaissance"
has become not all that different from the question "what is a sonnet sequence."
This paper reconstructs how sonnet sequences came to occupy such a privileged
position in considerations of the Renaissance by examining the most influential
anthology of sonnet sequences, Sidney Lee’s 1904 Elizabethan Sonnets.
In the introduction to his anthology, Lee sets out a definition of sonnet
sequences which remains today almost axiomatic. Rereading Lee’s anthology
helps us to examine the codification of a literary language which continues
to powerfully form our conceptions of the Renaissance. Lee’s introduction
argues that, on one hand, Elizabethan love sonnets utilize highly conventional
phrases and ideas (oxymorons, a cruel yet remote mistress) that indicate
a poetic subjectivity dependent upon a stable, dominant nobility and a
system of court patronage. On the other hand, he suggests that unconventional
sonnet sequences articulate a powerful poetic voice which emerges out of
nascent capitalism and
prefigures Romantic and post-Romantic poetic taste. The first
model emerges most conspicuously in Sidney’s sequence Astrophil and Stella,
which Lee includes in his anthology as representative of the period. The
second emerges in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which Lee does not include because
he suggests its "poetic merit" deserves "a place apart." In other
words, while Sidney’s conventional sequence enacts a late-feudal court
culture, Shakespeare’s purported unconventionality reflects a rising middle-class
that points forward to a Romantic lyricism associated with bourgeois subjectivity.
Lee’s anthology thus crystallizes in the language of sonnet sequences a
nineteenth-century view of the Renaissance (shared by both Marx and Burkhardt)
which sees the "late-feudal" nobility and the "rising" middle class as
historical antagonists battling each other for power and social control.
In sonnets, this battle occurs in the use of or resistance to "conventional"
language. When critics today speak of the "conventional" language
of sonnet sequences, they continue tacitly to depend upon the historical
assumptions Lee used to formulate that critical language—even though such
grand narratives now tend to be discounted as necessarily teleological.
The particular advantage of rereading Lee’s anthology, then, lies in the
possibility of asking new questions about sonnet sequences in order to
ask new questions about the Renaissance. Reexamining Lee’s anthology
gestures out at broad questions of the vitality of nineteenth-century historical
narrative. Are sonnet sequences and their language really representative
of the Renaissance generally? And if they are, what does the period
look like when we cease to view it through the lens of Lee’s sonnet "conventions"—that
is, as either late-feudal or proto-bourgeois? Why did both royalty like
Elizabeth and James as well as middling writers like Shakespeare and Spenser
write sonnets? What kind of authority did non-noble sonneteers gain
by writing sequences about nobles? How did sonneteers of differing
classes, religions, genders, and sexualities use the language of sonnet
sequences to institutionalize particular social formations and organizations
of authority? And to what extent did sonneteers themselves see their
works as participating in an act of periodization?
Elaine PIGEON, Université de Montréal
John Addington Symonds’ Queer Reading of Shakespeare
John Addington Symonds was one of the foremost literary critics in
Victorian England; his most famous work includes an extensive study of
the Renaissance. This paper, however, will foreground Symonds’ more personal
readings of Shakespeare. For instance, in his Memoirs -- published for
the first time in 1984 due to a fifty-year embargo -- Symonds relates how
“Venus and Adonis” stirred his homosexual desire when he was but an adolescent.
Yet, towards the end of his life, in collaborating with Havelock Ellis
on Sexual Inversion, Symonds agreed not to cite Shakespeare as an example
of inversion among famous artists, although they readily named Christopher
Marlowe. Because Ellis and Symonds never actually met, their correspondence
exists in the form of published letters. The second part of this paper
will explore their decision, since the inclusion of Shakespeare in the
Gay Canon remains such a contentious point.
Janine GALLANT, Université de Moncton
Les peintres de la Renaissance italienne au coeur de l’esthetique
de Stendhal
Parallèlement a son écriture romanesque, Stendhal a produit
un ensemble important d’essais et de réflexions théoriques.
Ainsi, en 1811, le jeune Beyle entreprend la rédaction d’une Histoire
de la peinture en Italie, projetant d’étudier les peintres «depuis
la renaissance de l’art, à la fin du XIIIe siècle jusqu’à
nos jours». Or, l’ouvrage final, paru en 1817, se limite à
la Renaissance. On a souvent avancé l’hypothèse que
la lassitude avait eu raison de l’auteur. Mais cet inachèvement
par rapport au projet initial semble plutôt le symptôme de
sa fascination quasi exclusive pour les figures marquantes de la Renaissance
picturale, fascination qui se développe durant la genèse
de l’Histoire de la peinture en Italie et qui ne sera jamais amenée
à disparaître par la suite. Nous nous proposons donc
d’examiner le rôle primordial qu’a joué la découverte
de ces peintres dans la formation de la pensée esthétique
de l’auteur.
Michel FOURNIER, University of Toronto
De la « préhistoire » du roman : la réception
du roman baroque dans le discours critique de la seconde moitié
du XIXe siècle en France.
Suite à la promotion dont a bénéficié le roman
au XIXe siècle, le discours critique semble accorder une nouvelle
importance à l’histoire de ce « parvenu des lettres ».
Si la Princesse de Clèves marque les « débuts »
du roman moderne en France, la lecture des textes qui précèdent
cette œuvre paraît être informée par une autre notion,
celle de préhistoire. Dans Le roman au dix-septième
siècle (1890), André le Breton fait des auteurs de ce siècle
« les primitifs du roman moderne ». À travers
la question de l’origine, l’archéologie du genre devient anthropologie
de l’imaginaire. Le roman baroque constitue alors la frontière
séparant une tradition fabuleuse, où planent encore des parfums
d’orient, et la conception faisant de la forme romanesque « une vivante
histoire du présent ». En s’attardant à certains
textes de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Cousin, Cherbuliez,
Le Breton, Brunetière), cette communication se propose d’étudier
la façon dont le discours critique de cette période définit
le roman des premiers temps, ainsi que la place qu’occupe cet « ancêtre
» dans la généalogie qui prend forme à l’époque.
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