Un roman historique in-ra-table : parodie ou méthode critique ?

Abstract

The European success of the Waverley novels in the 1820s led to a numerous production of historical novels, all built on the same Scottian model. This profusion inspired the ironical eloquence of three readers-authors-critics, the Prussian Willibald Alexis, the Frenchman Saint-Marc Girardin and the Italian Niccolò Tommaseo, who devised literary recipes to cook up impossible-to-miss historical novels. I suggest to read these recipes not as mere parodies ridiculing the uniformity of a fashionable literary genre but as a postextual and transtextual critical stance which blurs the boundaries both between literary works and their commentaries, and between the texts themselves.

Keywords

• possible text
• postextuality
• transtextuality
• comparatist theory
• stereotype