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- Title
Le discours sur le roman dans le panorama urbain: Tableau, style et histoire chez Louis Sébastien Mercier.
- Authors
BOUCHER, GENEVIÈVE
- Abstract
Even though Louis Sébastien Mercier has dealt with poetic questions in De la literature and Du theatre, the urban panorama he draws in the Tableau de Paris (1781-1788) gives him a pretext to think further about the social function of literature and about the ways that aesthetics can be modernized. Here and there, Mercier talks about the novel, but this genre is almost never considered specifically. Mercier's discourse on the novel is indeed very general and it is closely related to his discourse on drama. Nevertheless, as the years pass and as the volumes of the Tableau grow in number, the novel becomes more and more important in Mercier's critical discourse. It is mostly around the question of style that the theoretical discourse on novel is articulated. Fictional style appears as a model of literary effectiveness as it is the more likely to create an intimate connection between the author and the reader as well as a sentimental chain through which the work can have a true effect. After the 1789 Revolution, Mercier continues the project of the Tableau de Paris in Le nouveau Paris (1799), a work that aims to portray Parisian life in the 1790's while outlining one of the first histories of the Revolution. In this work, the theoretical discourse on novel disappears, but it is reinvested in the heart of the narrative. In several passages of the Nouveau Paris, Mercier parts with the neutrality required by historical discourse and embraces stylistic procedures that are normally associated with the novel. Mercier's goal is not merely to inform his readers of the events of the Revolution but to create an aesthetic effect that profoundly touches the reader. Fiction is therefore considered as a vehicle for the picturesque and the sublime that the author wishes to pass on through the narrative of this astonishing History that has become a source of aesthetic emotion.
- Subjects
MERCIER, Louis-Sebastien, 1740-1814; CITIES &; towns in literature; PARIS (France) in literature; TABLEAU de Paris (Book); LE nouveau Paris (Book); FRENCH literature; FICTION; LITERARY criticism; LITERARY theory
- Publication
Études Françaises, 2013, Vol 49, Issue 1, p23
- ISSN
0014-2085
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.7202/1018792ar