Pour une identité esthétique de l’écriture romantique: les effets théâtraux dans la prose. Le cas des nouvelles staëliennes
For an aesthetic identity of romantic writing: the case of Madame de Staël’s short stories

Summary/Abstract: Our study focuses on the aesthetic specificity of Romantic writing. One of the features of Romantic writing is the mixing of literary genres: the novelist likes to borrow means from the theatre; in the same time the lyrical insertions slip into dramatic scenes. Literary corpus: we propose to follow these aspects in Madame de Staël’s early short story: Adélaïde and Théodore, written and published before 1800 (before the first wave of French Romanticism). Working hypotheses: the writer, even though she was young, practised the exercise of mixing literary genres, i.e. she inserted theatrical effects into short prose; the short stories in question are a case of putting on a "show": prose and drama, giving a privileged place to theatrical accents in the short stories. The role of this narrative technique is to highlight the contrast between the characters and the moments of their drama, which are nevertheless told in prose. As an actress, novelist, essayist and successful short story writer, Madame de Staël never enjoyed the same success as a dramatist, which is perhaps why she always slipped theatrical effects into her literary productions.

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