Des vitrines sur le roman : les couvertures de Madame Bovary et Salammbô

Abstract

Images on book covers put the reader at the center of an experience that is both cultural and emotional, whose intensity varies according to the objective. It is a visual code with which one can explore a work’s content, and, in return, it gives us the reading keys for the survival and transformation of a literary character in a collective imaginary. Our analysis will focus on two works: Madame Bovary and Salammbô, two heroines belonging to separate, if not contrary, chronological and geographical spheres. One is modernity’s icon, the other the emblem of a magical and ancestral antiquity. These two figures of the literary imagination incite book cover artists and iconographers to make fundamentally different choices, even if some common features of these heroines’ personality (their instable and dreamy nature), outline analogies in the iconic transposition process when one wants to remodel them according to the dominant canon in the cultural context of the time.