Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Roman de science-fiction français'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Roman de science-fiction français.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
Grau, Donatien. "Le roman romain : généalogie d'un genre français." Thesis, Paris 4, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014PA040069.
This thesis aims to address the emergence and the development in French literature of a whole new genre, from the beginning of the 19th until the end of the 20th century: the contemporaneous Roman-themed novel. Dealing not with the stability of the Ancient City, its ruins and its monuments, but with the shifting urban and human landscape of the time, it disrupts the tradition of the Grand Tour, which was implicitly based on the notion that no fiction could be invented in the eternal present of Rome, since the perception one could have there was so deeply rooted in the past. By using the novel, writers were simultaneously confronted to the modernity of the medium and to the urban and political modernisation of the city, while the sign of Rome – the myth of the Eternal City – was always present in their mind. Novels set in contemporaneous Rome provided their authors with the possibility to engage with the most crucial issues inherent to the aesthetics and ethics of fiction: the role of belief in modern cultures – in terms of religion and its counterpart, literary fiction; the role of the past in the construction of modernity; the importance of the present in the experience of the past; the meaning of the Ancients at the time of the Moderns. Analysing the forms of the French contemporaneous Roman-themed novel signifies even more than engaging with the portrait of a city: it is a study in the relevance of Western paradigms
Álvarez, Izquierdo Marta. "Juan Carlos Onetti, Roman Nouveau latino-américain et le Nouveau Roman français." Thesis, Paris 3, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012PA030027.
The work of Juan Carlos Onetti, prolific, diverse and singular, represents the renovation of the Uruguayan and Latin-American literature. When he was assistant editor for the magazine Marcha between 1939 and 1941, he exposed in a series of articles his viewpoint about literature, which needed, as he stated, a renovation urgently. His own work illustrates those theories; and with the mythic city Santa Maria he created, he developed a new kind of urban literature more in accordance with his contemporaries and the world he lived in. In France, the Nouveau Roman, which emerged in about 1940, constitutes a rupture in French literature. This innovative movement, often called "literature of look", went beyond traditional narrative forms. The purpose of this study is to compare Juan Carlos Onetti’s work with certain books written by two representatives of the Nouveau Roman: Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon. From three axes the study of a character in crisis, the study of different narrative voices and the study of the relationship between man, his writings and fiction, this research work questions and analyses new narrative forms which definitively changed the rules of the Past
Santurenne, Thierry. "L'opéra dans la fiction narrative française de 1850 à 1914." Paris 4, 2003. http://www.theses.fr/2003PA040094.
As other nineteenth-century cultural works did, opera contributed to enriching writers'imaginative world, concerned about both its artistic and institutional dimension. In the second part of the period, narrative fiction references to the lyrical phenomenon make it the basis of a metaliterary thought in which the prima donna's personality, the way the performance is looked at, the voice rendering are so many themes used by novelists and short story writers to stage their relationship with writing. This support of opera to the self-reflexive meaning of the works adds to their anthropological purpose. Thus, the hints to the lyrical performance provide the writers with an essential tool for exploring the limits of the reality painted in fiction. Narrative fiction resorts to the sung drama as well, symbolizing the unstable equilibrium between the Apollinian and the Dionysiac, to emphasize the threat exerted by the latter on society, incessantly endangered by a devastating cruelty which persuades the myths enriching opera. Finally, its connivance with the socio-political field supplies the novelists with a significant material to the social criticism in which they represent moreover the emergence of a rebellious subjectivity through the consciousness of a spectator from now on more responsive to his own mental representations than to the splendours of the prevailing ideologies
Quaquarelli, Lucia. "Objets de fiction, quelques fonctions narratives de l'objet romanesque (France-Italie 1980-1990)." Paris 3, 2003. http://www.theses.fr/2003PA030088.
This work deals with the study of objects in novels. It lays out a " functional " analytical path of these magical objects, based on the reading of a number of Italian and French novels from the Eighties. Although these fictive objects generally manifest an important utility profile - in a similar way to their cousins in the real world (by the necessity of resemblance and internal motivation) - they equally always possess a fictional and functional role which goes beyond such a profile. It is a role which appears around the relation the objects establish with the characters and the events of the story or, on another level, with the narration. A role which registers constants within the history of the novel, from which it is interesting to measure the distance, rather than the points in common, which mark the most recent production. This is the reason why this study proposes two distinct paths between the objets which punctuate the novels of the Eighties. The first follows the traces of the relation which ties the fictive objects to the characters and the second questions the functions of the fictive objects with regard to the narration. Only two paths are proposed in the vast and complex network of invisible relations at the heart of which the object can be found; two paths which pan out far from the will to taxonomize or be exhaustive. Two analytic itineraries which respond to the necessity to account for the specificity of the corpus of fiction chosen, with for a backdrop a diachronic-dialectic literary dimension from which this specificity can be grasped
Najjara, Nabil. "Le retour critique de l’intrigue dans le Nouveau Roman français : entre tension et passion." Thesis, Toulouse 2, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012TOU20028/document.
The object of this research is to revisit the notion of “intrigue” in the new novel after a campaign of theoretical belittlement led by certain new novelists. A reconsideration which is essentially inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s works on “ the stake in intrigue” and which is based mainly on the recent studies of Raphaël Baroni on the narrative tension.In the first part it is question of handling in literary and critical perspective this notion by confronting it with the so-called “traditional” novel and by examining the numerous works of the writers, the critics and the theorists who approached this question.The second part is concretely and deeply analysed where the ideas of fiction, passion, suspense and tension are studied. Finally the last part is a kind of resumption of precise model of “intrigue” which is the one of the detective novel in the perspective to bring to light its fascinating and passionate aspect
CHEBIL, BEN SALEM AMEL. "Typologie et poetique de l'incipit dans la fiction narrative du xixe et du xxe siecles." Université Marc Bloch (Strasbourg) (1971-2008), 1999. http://www.theses.fr/1999STR20012.
This thesis is situated in the field of the theory of the text, more precisely in this critical mouvement, specialised in the analysis of the elements of the beginning and the end of the narrative. It is particularly dedicatec to the matter of the beginning of the narrative in the novel of the 2nd half of the 20th century and of the first half of the 20th century. We will first try define the beginning of the novel. It is a field, which vary from a novel to another. It raises the problem of the demarcation of the beginning of the text. In the second part of the thesis, we will try to draw a poetic of the beginning, analysing the different fonctions and strategies : the fonction of the "codification", the fonctions of information and orientation, the fonction of seduction, the fonction of the "dramatisation", finally the fonction of deconstruction and of parody of the traditionnal beginning of the novel. This latter fonction is generally found in the novels written by authors of the rebellious movement of the "nouveau roman". The third part of the thesis is dedicated, on the one hand, to analyse the connection between the different parts of the text, especially the ones that the beginning of a text has with other structures of the novel (elements around the text and the closure) it is dedicated, on the other hand, to situate the beginning of a text in its connections between the different novels of various novelists, to define a poetic of the beginning, which passes through all the novels of the same author (actually emile zola et louis aragon). The conclusion is thematic : it deals with the typology of the beginnings of the tyextx, which still raises a problem and i open on other inaugural schemes, which are not categoried. Beyond the efforts of the theorisation, which ains at reduce the beginning of the text to a normative rhetoric of the inauguration. Each beginning of a text has to be studied in relation to the aesthetic and the stake of its novel. With the evolution and involution of the novel, we are faced to the beginning of the text which passes out to all the attemps of theorisation and typology (confer to novels by claude simon)
Touboul, Anaëlle. ""Histoires de fous". Approche de la folie dans le roman français du XXe siècle." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016USPCA123/document.
Haunting our collective imagination, the madman has always been laden with symbolic significance. The myth of madness is abundantly present in literature, however those characters with an actual mental illness are ultimately overshadowed. While mental patients are pushed to the margins of literature, just as they are pushed to the outskirts of society, this particular cultural legend of madness develops during the nineteenth century in Romantic and fantastic literature and stays in the spotlight at the beginning of the following century through the avant-garde artists. In contrast to the aforementioned representation of madness, a number of novelists of the twentieth century, including Georges Duhamel, André Baillon, Julien Green, Henry de Montherlant or Alexandre Vialatte, brought on a literary shift away from “madness” towards “the madman” – from the myth to the individual. The focus of this piece of work is on the modality and logic leading to the emancipation of the figure of the madman and its affirmation as an autonomous subject – in every sense of the world – in the literary field. These fictional stories, where the alienated consciousness is both the focus and the main subject of the narrative, present the reader with an almost familiar madness. They don’t idealize insanity but provide representations of almost ordinary disorders, which affect a banal character living a modest life. Through their semantic, syntactic and pragmatic preferences, these stories form a fictional “sub-genre”, called “histoires de fous”. This research aims at determining the generic features of these novels and at considering the way madness questions the means and powers of fiction. Another purpose is to shed light on how literature helps us understand this inconceivable experience, which represents the other side of the commonly shared human experience of reason and logic, and to study how novelists help to reveal as well as reshape the characterization of this social and cultural topic
Hummel, Clément. "Modernités du roman scientifique chez J.-H. Rosny aîné." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Normandie, 2023. http://www.theses.fr/2023NORMC033.
J.-H. Rosny aîné (1856-1940) is the author of a large literary work, including novels, short stories, articles published in the press and in scientific journals. Literary history remembers his involvement in the dispute against Émile Zola's naturalism, his role in the Goncourt Academy, of which he was a founding member and President, the maturity he brought to prehistoric narratives through his seminal novel La Guerre du feu and numerous texts that now position him as one of the pioneers of science fiction in France. The interest of that author lies not so much in what he foreshadowed but rather in the literary modernity he both theorized and practiced at a time when the art of the novel was in crisis in France, and scientific storytelling struggled to move beyond the model set by Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires. This work particularly analyzes the multifaceted connections that this versatile author maintained with the sciences, which held a “poetic passion” for him and to which he declared himself a reformer. While he produced various essays on scientific philosophy and presented some of his reflections to the Academy of Sciences, it’s through the medium of the novel that he invents both modern science and literature
Sag, Mélanie. "Les guerres civiles dans les romans anglais et français de l'époque baroque (1580-1668) : poétique du roman, anatomie du conflit et usages de la fiction." Paris 7, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014PA070032.
This work examines the use of civil wars in English and French novels between 1580 and 1668 that is to say during the Baroque period. At this time, France and England were going through a revolutionary political, religious but also social crisis. Our framework is based on genre studies, contemporary theories of fiction and historicity. We aimed at shedding a new light on novel's poetics and analysing the articulation of fact and fiction through the study of a corpus of thirty little-known novels. The comparison between the French novels and the English ones implies to identify what defines the genre of early modern novel and its boundaries for both countries, and determine the genealogy of the narrative models used by the authors. We then establish the poetics of war through the analyses of the narrative functions of war sequences, the way characters are build up and the stylistics of violence (staged or faded). Finally, we suggest an interpretation of the novels. From the remembrance of wars of religion to the record of the English Revolution, Baroque novels constitute a specific form of historical fiction, characterized by the displacement of collective stakes and the metaphorisation of the religious division to the level of the couple or the family but also the recycling of the allegorical writing style. The Baroque novel is dedicated to love as opposed to the epic genre, it offers various and complex representations of civil war, this internai conflict questioning one's identity, faith and sense of belonging, three key concepts of the early modern novel
Bernard, Marie-Monique. "Le voyage : réalité et fiction dans la première moitié du VXIIIème siècle." Paris 4, 1999. http://www.theses.fr/1998PA040281.
Sadeghian, Saeed. "La « fiction biographique » : une étude comparée en contexte français et iranien." Thesis, Paris 10, 2020. http://www.theses.fr/2020PA100083.
Biographical writing is presented as one of the major practices of contemporary French literature. A practice interpreted as a reappearance aiming to correlate the revival of individualism and the contamination of the present regime of historicity with an obsession of the past. One of the multiple forms of contemporary life writing is « biographical fiction » which links the authors in their desire to restore the life of the Other past within texts indicated by their reluctance in respect with the codes of the standard biography. Far from this rich landscape in expressions, biography could not easily be expressed in contemporary Persian literature. This difference arises the question of knowing the reasons which distinguish the fate of the biographical genre in the French and Iranian contexts. To outline some elements of the answers, this thesis proposes both a contextual historical study and an intercontextual sociological comparison: the first draws up a table of biographical expressions forms in Persian literature to draw a line of evolution; the second provides the opportunity to bring together two social contexts and two literary systems, to talk about the elements that support or hinder the biographical production beyond the auctorial ambition. However, a textual analysis is in charge of highlighting this auctorial ambition through the vehicle that each author takes to respond to the generic challenges of biographical writing in the romantic regime
Najjara, Nabil. "Le retour critique de l'intrigue dans le Nouveau Roman français : entre tension et passion." Phd thesis, Université Toulouse le Mirail - Toulouse II, 2012. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00949178.
Sigalas, Clément. "La guerre manquée : Représentations de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le roman français (1945-1960)." Thesis, Paris 4, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015PA040204.
This thesis deals with the representations of the Second World War found in the French novels published between 1945 and 1960. It aims to shed light on a body of works that depict a “failed war”, unlike the epic vision which prevails in the post-war period. It analyses from an aesthetic, ethical and political perspective twenty novels or so which portray war as an unreal, elusive experience shared by French people.The first part of this work scrutinizes the way writers depict the failure of war. These novels portray the conflict as both spectral and brutal – seen from a distance, almost always mediated, concealed under the appearance of peace, yet unescapably destructive.These novels also throw light on the failure of community. A far cry from the seminal, unifying narrative of the epic, they start attacking the myth of France as unified in the war effort very soon after the end of the conflict.The second part of this thesis looks at the ways they construct the image of a torn or passive nation, as if they were France’s guilty conscience.This study will finally examine the way the novel “thinks”, how it was specifically used to convey a specific reflection on community. Against the discourses of literary Resistance, then Existentialism, it questioned the primacy of rational thinking in men; against the prominence of documents, it embraced fiction as a means to explore dark territories; against the calls for exemplariness, it constituted itself as an autonomous space to investigate the war, as well as to challenge the failures and shortcomings of the epic discourse
Nkunzimana, Obed. "Le roman africain et québécois des années 1980, une poétique de la résistance." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0018/NQ46689.pdf.
Bédée, Estelle. "L’Insurrection dans le roman du XIXe siècle : de Prosper Mérimée à Lucien Descaves." Thesis, Paris 10, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017PA100163/document.
Work builds a corpus around canonical novels devoted to the topic of the insurrection. It is about studying crowds’pictures, insurgents’ portraits, place of the historical referent, as well as the ideological dimension of these texts. The typology study thus brings to reflect on generic questions: historical novel, Romance with thesis, and to a certain extent adventure’s stories. The interactions of the writing with other artistic and media forms of expression make it possible to question on the report with the context, while being also based on the literary history. So the thesis is divided into two parts: the first looks further into the context of the 19th century, in France and abroad, in order to understand the relation with the event and the ideologies of the time, which are found integrated into the fiction. The second concentrates on the writing, (characters, reasons and speech), to try to answer the following question: is the novel of insurrection a kind except for whole? The insurrection as a topic then seems the means of expressing his report in the world, a method of expression at the same time anchored in reality and subjected to a subjective vision which cannot be freed from the ideology; the novel of insurrection becomes then a fragment of the chronicle and an opening on the modern history
André, Valérie. "Le roman de libertinage, 1782-1815: de l'exhumation à la réhabilitation?" Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/212334.
Fontaine, Anne-Chantal. "La réception du roman québécois par la presse anglo-montréalaise de 1960 à 1976." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1996. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/mq21751.pdf.
Beinstingel, Thierry. "La représentation du travail dans les récits français depuis la fin des Trente Glorieuses." Thesis, Bourgogne Franche-Comté, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017UBFCH024/document.
There has been a resurgence of interest in the theme of work, since the end of the Thirty Glorious Years. Initially centered on a few emblematic works, there has emerged in subsequent years, multifaceted forms of expression that do not lend themselves easily to unifying categorisation. However, a specific literariness has emerged on this theme that reflects an originality that is unique within the realm of literary production. Whilst all writers hesitate about the best means to narrate human activities, those who write about work face particular difficulties in defining their position and status. The notion of fiction itself is challenged as it shifts between the domain of the real and the imaginary. Although the theme of work had been identified with realist literature since the time of Zola, it has since become a neutral subject in a trivialised corpus of fiction
Lamarre, Mélanie. "Représentations de l'utopie dans la fiction romanesque contemporaine : Antoine Volodine, Olivier Rolin." Lille 3, 2010. http://www.theses.fr/2010LIL30015.
Echoing the great disillusion that has stricken the social imaginary since the mid-seventies, the French contemporary novel meditates on the disappearance of the Marxist utopia. Rejecting facile scorning of the past as well as nostalgic complacency, Antoine Volodine and Olivier Rolin question why the utopian project failed, and why it has disappeared from collective representations. Depicting utopia as a seductive image conveyed by political tales, their fictions underline the distance which separated ideals from reality. But their ironic stance is accompanied by melancholy, since utopia kept epic hopes and dreams alive. This study analyses how the French contemporary novel deals with this paradox and the double nature of utopia. Meanwhile, it attempts to elucidate how literature contributes in a remarkable way to the construction as well as the criticism of collective representations
Lecomte, Dauthuille Sylvaine. "Le motif improbable ˸ le récit d’enquête français contemporain, Thierry Beinstingel, Emmanuel Carrère et Jean Rolin." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018USPCA036.
Literary narrative forms at the dawn of 21st century sometimes take the form of an enquiry. The present thesis aims to examine in detail this narrative technique as practised by Thierry Beinstingel, Emmanuel Carrère et Jean Rolin. The way they use it could help to understand and identify the aesthetic qualities and purposes of this emerging narrative mode. In these stories, the narrator feels his own thoughts as locked inside an authoritarian doxa which he must first overcome to recover his freedom of perception. He can then become involved in the enquiry, which can be understood as a phenomenological way to be aware. He then selects an arbitrary or improbable motif as the goal for his quest, which may be a person, an object, a project, an area, and undertakes to tell the story of his own inquiry. From this starting point, he begins to question the meaning of his existence and to observe himself making sense of, reading, thinking about and reacting to things. Between fiction and nonfiction, these frequently digressive tales often border on novels, essays or investigation journalism. The narrator always looks puzzled, hesitant and does not seem to trust his own approach. Yet in the background we witness the emergence of a dynamic both narrative and introspective through which the narrator becomes an acute observer of the world around him. He follows freely his train of thought through among other things the use of the essay form to drift from an idea to the next, finding new means of expressing the critique of social problems, creating novel ways of building new fictional worlds and perhaps even managing to rebel against the idea that there is no alternative to the world as it exists
Ntsame, Mve Carole. "L'art du feuilleton dans les Habits Noirs de Paul Féval." Thesis, Lille 3, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012LIL30057/document.
Our Thesis is based on the eight novels from the Paul Féval’s cycle Les habits noirs (The black clothes): Les habits noirs, Cœur d’acier, La rue de Jérusalem, L’arme invisible, Maman Léo, L’avaleur de sabre, Les compagnons du trésor, La bande cadet. We decided to study the series Les habits noirs of Paul Féval because we are convinced that this cycle of novels requests the collaboration of the reader. We do not claim to exhaust all the interpretative potential which these novels conceal, but we think in contrast that many things remain to be said. The studies undertaken in our work are only one contribution in the field of literature, and more precisely in literary criticism. The 19th Century in France is obviously the era of the rise of many innovations. All the fields of technological and intellectual activity will know important changes. Technological and scientific fields, as well as Humanities, have known changes that deeply modified them. Paul Féval is often considered as one of the most popular novelists of the 19th Century: he wrote tales, short stories, books of history, autobiographical, fantastic, historical, social, epistolary, crime novels, plays; he was also journalist and lecturer. Our work is devoted to all that refers to the human and intellectual formation in Paul Féval’s Les habits noirs. Our issue is to know if Les habits noirs contains the main characteristics of the 19th Century serial novels
Barbillon, Chrystelle. "Mode narratif, mode dramatique : l’adaptation théâtrale de fiction narrative au XVIIe siècle en France." Thesis, Paris 4, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012PA040006.
Often dismissed as the production of second-hand literature, though constantly used by modern stage directors and playwrights, adaptation has frequently been neglected by critics; barely theorised by those who practice it, it has been approached with an approximate definition. Through the study of thirty novels and short stories − ranging from Honoré d'Urfé's L’Astrée (1607-1625) to Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672) − and the study of some eighty theatrical adaptations, this work analyses the theatrical adaptation of narrative fictions as a coherent writing practice, which each and every play embodies in a different way. Starting with a clear definition of what theatrical adaptation means, then proceeding with a careful reading of the works and a detailed review of contemporary theories, we build tools to analyse this corpus and avoid the aporias adaptation theories have usually been confronted with. This reading of adaptation, based on rhetorics, enables us to follow the process of adaptative writing step by step through its various techniques − from the selection of material within the novel to the designing and actual writing of the play to its final staging. Thus we define the poetics of a transmodal adaptation, which reinvents the working of rhetorical categories and questions the potentiality of drama as a semiotic medium. Adaptation therefore challenges literary genres − sometimes confirming their topoï, sometimes creating new forms − and thus tackles aesthetics-related issues. Theatrical adaptation appears as a field of literary experimentation and formal innovation, within which intertextual references reverberate and multiply in various levels of reading. Exhibiting its second-hand nature and therefore its literary quality, theatrical adaptation rightly deserves to be read as a major contribution to the French seventeenth-century dramatic literature, to which it gives back its density and richness
Vauterin, Thomas. "Codes littéraires et codes sociaux dans la titrologie du roman québécois au XXe siècle." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp04/mq26369.pdf.
Guisy, Maryan. "La représentation du monde politique dans le roman au XIXe siècle." Paris 3, 2006. http://www.theses.fr/2006PA030066.
The realist novel which dominates 19th century literature has set itself the objective of writing the history of social customs and practice. The political world is one of the themes it tackles and this study questions its representation during a period (1815-1914) which is characterized by major institutional instability and many crises. Through the image which is projected of the actors (leaders, opponents, crowds, "public opinion"), of the places, the intrigues, the rituals, the significant historical events (revolutions, affairs) multiple tensions emerge: competition between the novelist and his characters, hesitations between the functions of writer and politician, difficulties in respecting aesthetic presuppositions with the hero’s return to favour, the reintroduction of the "novelistic" format and the use of a mannered style (symbols, metaphors). As regards the "documentary objectivity", it is often damaged by authors who venture "to take sides"
Bréan, Simon. "La science-fiction en France de la Seconde Guerre mondiale à la fin des années soixante-dix." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Paris 4, 2010. https://www.numeriquepremium.com/content/books/9782840508502.
After the Second World War in France, science fiction literature took the form of an isolated subaltern field within the literary field, featuring specific publishing series, critics and readership. In science fiction novels, fictional worlds are created by mixing conventional reality and alternate states of reality, a process I call “régime ontologique matérialiste spéculatif” (“speculative materialistic ontological status”). I have studied French science fiction novels first from a historical perspective, by describing the protagonists, the publishers and the themes of French science fiction, as well as by assessing how and to what end French science fiction writers wrote their novels. I have then studied these novels at several levels: how words and texts are shaped in science fiction, how fictional worlds are extrapolated from the real world and how science fiction texts generate a collective memory, which I call the “macrotext” of science fiction. Our thesis contributes to literary history by studying how the perception of science fiction gradually changes over time, each main paradigm morphing into a new one as writers adapt science fiction images and ideas to their needs. I have also pointed out how science fiction novels may prove of a keen interest to narrative discourse analysis, fiction theory and intertextuality approach, because of various devices meant to allow science fiction worlds to compete with reality
Gosme, Michel. "Litterature et science dans les romans de zola de 1886 a 1902." Paris 4, 1998. http://www.theses.fr/1997PA040146.
This thesis studies the relationships between fictional narrative and science in the novels written by emile zola between 1886 and 1902. It first underlines the gaps between these two domains, which are known to be worlds apart, and zola's position in relation to this problematic. It notes that the speech of physiology is prominent but as zola's relation to science evolved, the fictional vision expanded in keeping with the dominant theory of positivism and shifted from a study of the body to that of society. The next step is to take stock of the main positive elements with an epistemological outlook : the concept of irreversibility together with that of vitalism seem to be pregnant in zola's conception. After delineating a history of the development of the theme of science in zola's thinking, three fundamental contributions will be dealt with more at length : taine's critical thinking, claude bernard's experimental method and the thesis of heredity which constitutes the backbone of rougon-macquart l'oeuvre is seen as a fundamental novel because it was published at a time when naturalism was in peril : this novel is exemplary because it asserts the necessity of science as a weapon against physiological as well as social degeneracy. The use of science-related discourse by zola is analysed throughout the subsequent novels with special emphasis on the emergence of the regeneration theme and the solutions mentioned by zola to overcome degeneracy. Zola's vitalism increasingly asserts itself until, in docteur pascal, it is associated, in theory, to the redeeming quality of science. In the series of trois villes, our study focuses on the processes of man's liberation, then in quatre evangfles and its utopian time-scheme, on the solutions found, through an experimental story, the product of the author's "romantic scientism"
Coudurier, Perrine. "Le mal dans les récits français des années 1950 : terreur et rhétorique." Thesis, Paris 4, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014PA040126.
Our work relates to the question of evil in French stories published between 1945 and 1962, therefore between two trials that have questioned the specificity of evil and guilt, namely the Nuremberg trial and the Eichmann trial. These stories, written after the war, were published by writers who either directly took part in the fight (like Simon or Camus), or simply had echos of it (like Butor or Bataille). The heart of our study is the essay of Jean Paulhan entitled Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou la terreur dans les lettres. This essay enabled us to analyse evil, not only in terms of History — by referring to the Nazi terror and its consequences — but also in literary and metaphorical terms, therefore considering the term ‘terror’ according to the definition of Paulhan and Sade. In both these stories and our work, terror is constantly offset by its opposite, rhetoric, which constitutes the basis for a generation of ‘anti-Modern’ writers who aim at esthetical modernity without denying the importance of the novelistic tradition of the 19th Century. The question of evil through the notions of terror and rhetoric leads us to specify the approach of evil in Sartre and Bataille’s novels, or in testimonies. These notions allow us to analyse the status of the Nouveau Roman from an historical perspective, often denied by critics, and to show the constant wavering of this group of writers between terror and rhetoric. The nouveaux romanciers are not only looking for exception, abstruseness, but they are also seeking a common rhetoric, capable of recreating a community otherwise broken by the war
Petit, Adrienne. "Le Discours romanesque des passions. Rhétorique et poétique des passions dans la fiction narrative en prose du XVIIe siècle." Thesis, Paris 4, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016PA040171.
This PhD dissertation aims at studying the changes that took place during the XVIIth century in the way passions are expressed and represented in narrative fiction in prose. With the transition from long novels (« longs romans ») to the « nouvelles galantes », the year 1660 is often considered a landmark date for the novelistic genre. This formal renewal has a particular bearing on the question of affectivity, from a stylistic, enunciative and pragmatic point of view. Whereas pathetic expression is redefined by the critique of ornament and the promotion of the natural, the vissicitudes of the novel seem to be partly correlated to those of the art of speaking. By taking the whole century as our object of study, through a vast choice of fictional, rhetoric and poetic texts, we have tried to describe one by one the stages of this evolution. This perspective leads us to qualify the innovative character of the « nouvelle historique et galante ». The baroque novel presents itself as an anthology of passionate discourses. However, from the 1620s on, a fading away of the narrative voice, and consequently of the marks of an emotional narration, take place. Equally, the psycho-narration associated in literary history with the Princesse de Clèves is already a well attested narrative technique in the first XVIIth century. Following the tradition of the history of literary forms, we wish to offer a new periodisation of the novelistic genre, through the analysis of the semiotisation of passions
Amir, Lucie. "Politiques contemporaines du polar français (2004-2019)." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Limoges, 2023. https://aurore.unilim.fr/theses/nxfile/default/e836e4e9-3e38-4971-97be-c27705da01e3/blobholder:0/2023LIMO0071.pdf.
This PDH work investigates the conceptions of literature that have promoted the revival of crime fiction in France since the turn of the 21st century. While the press still portrays a 'literature of rebels', committed to denouncing the dysfunctions of the social world, the study highlights the decline of the 'literary leftism' epitomized by néo-polar generations in the 1970s-1990s. Contrary to a cliché of crime fiction as political literature, the work shows how complex and plural the contemporary politics of "polar" are. It explores the misunderstandings surrounding the political imaginary of the genre, examines the outlines of a new pragmatic approach, adapted to an extended publishing market and to the cultural policies that have taken hold of the genre. The study draws on literary studies, social sciences and discourse analysis. It is based on a literary corpus corresponding to the 200 or so novels labelled “polar” and awarded between 2004 and 2019, as well as on a large collection of discourse from the press, from literary festivals and from 25 research interviews with authors, publishers and gatekeepers (prize and festival organisers). I defend the hypothesis of a republican re-reading of crime novel that has been favoured by its institutionalisation. As mass-market literature which is also realist literature, French contemporary “polar” carries the ideal of enlightened citizenship and portrays itself as the mediator of intellectual empowerment, that has become a central horizon for emancipation
Gueneau, Sybila. "Roman noir et critique sociale : réel et violence dans le néo-polar (après mai 1968)." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Paris, EHESS, 2023. http://www.theses.fr/2023EHES0171.
The “Neo-polar” movement or “New French School of Crime Fiction” emerged after the events of May 1968. Its founder Jean-Patrick Manchette coined this term, forging a genre inspired by American noir which incarnates the political shift in French crime fiction. Its main authors, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Pierre Siniac, Frédéric Fajardie, A.D.G., Jean Vautrin, Jean-Bernard Pouy, Hervé Prudent, Thierry Jonquet, and Didier Daeninckx expressed via their writing the violence coming from this political questioning while pushing the boundaries of crime fiction’s conventions. Since the birth of Neo-polar, French crime fiction has centered on questioning the social turmoil of its era. The genre’s social shift favors criticism of consumerism, political institutions, and working-class everyday life, echoing the sociological debates of that time period. Through their narration, Neo-polar writers introduced critical thinking about modernity to crime fiction via the representation of bodies as merchandise and a reflection on physical and symbolic violence, constantly intertwining them. Following the works of Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Guy Debord, and the influence of cinema and the punk movement, they produce a dialogue between popular literature, social sciences, and political thinking. This thesis, which is the first to treat the Neo-polar as a literary movement, offers a reflection on the different forms of social critique in the genre by examining a corpus of novels written by the movement’s main authors. Through its roots in literary, sociological, and narratological analysis, this thesis articulates three analytical perspectives—the breaking of noir’s genre conventions, the establishment of new narrative structures, and their meaning. Within the scope of situationism, the Neo-polar positions the individual against crime violence and against the violence which comes from a monstrous and alienating society. These representations place violence at the core of this deliberation: in the narrative structure, but also in language. This thesis considers the ambiguity of the political discourse of a genre that is mainly qualified as French noir’s shift to the left, but that we would rather perceive as its deconstructed and nihilistic form, mirroring what the punk movement was for rock at the time. This thesis situates the Neo-polar movement within the historical and literary context of the second half of the 20th century through the literary analysis of works which were never studied before (novels by Hervé Prudon, Pierre Siniac, Jean Vautrin Thierry Jonquet). It aims to emphasize the impact that this movement had on popular culture from that era. Neo-polar is from being a mere fad; it demonstrates a renewed vision of this literary genre, which in the context of May 1968, questions literature as much as it questions political institutions
Donnarieix, Anne-Sophie. "Réenchanter le monde ? : formes et enjeux poétologiques du surnaturel dans le roman français contemporain : Antoine Volodine, Sylvie Germain, Alain Fleischer, Marie Ndiaye, Christian Garcin." Thesis, Paris 10, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019PA100065.
This dissertation explores the resurgence of the supernatural in the French novel since the 1980s – a topic that has been little studied to date and whose morphological, aesthetic, and socio-historical forms are intended to constitute the core of analysis. At the interface between the established genres of the miraculous, the fantastic or the magical realism, the supernatural elements that recur in many fictional texts point to a certain literary heritage, but they cannot be fully grasped by these categories and thus invite us to reconsider them. Through the staging of magical, spectral and shamanistic imaginaries, they also question the relationship of our society to rationalism and determinism and its crisis of recent decades. With the analysis of selected novels by Antoine Volodine, Sylvie Germain, Alain Fleischer, Marie NDiaye and Christian Garcin, this work pursues a double goal. On the one hand, it seeks to illuminate the singularity of contemporary supernatural forms and their complex structures; on the other hand, it seeks to take a closer look at the poetological functions attributed to them. By oscillating between the temptation of reenchanting the world and a pronounced destabilizing function, these novels unfold an ambivalent space that intertwines reality and imagination and strongly problematizes the forms of our existence, both within the plot and at a narratological or even a stylistic level
Elgue, de Martini Cristina. "La re-escritura de la historia en las ficciones argentina y quebequense contemporáneas." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0002/NQ43067.pdf.
Leblond, Aude. "Poétique du roman-fleuve, de Jean-Christophe à Maumort." Phd thesis, Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle - Paris III, 2010. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00714342.
Bréan, Simon. "La science-fiction en France de la Seconde Guerre mondiale à la fin des années soixante-dix." Thesis, Paris 4, 2010. http://www.theses.fr/2010PA040125.
After the Second World War in France, science fiction literature took the form of an isolated subaltern field within the literary field, featuring specific publishing series, critics and readership. In science fiction novels, fictional worlds are created by mixing conventional reality and alternate states of reality, a process I call “régime ontologique matérialiste spéculatif” (“speculative materialistic ontological status”). I have studied French science fiction novels first from a historical perspective, by describing the protagonists, the publishers and the themes of French science fiction, as well as by assessing how and to what end French science fiction writers wrote their novels. I have then studied these novels at several levels: how words and texts are shaped in science fiction, how fictional worlds are extrapolated from the real world and how science fiction texts generate a collective memory, which I call the “macrotext” of science fiction. Our thesis contributes to literary history by studying how the perception of science fiction gradually changes over time, each main paradigm morphing into a new one as writers adapt science fiction images and ideas to their needs. I have also pointed out how science fiction novels may prove of a keen interest to narrative discourse analysis, fiction theory and intertextuality approach, because of various devices meant to allow science fiction worlds to compete with reality
Gauthier, Luc. "Le fantastique dans les contes canadiens-français du XIXe siècle." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp05/mq21989.pdf.
Hakim, Zeina. "La fiction déjouée. La part du jeu dans l’écriture fictionnelle (1687-1781)." Thesis, Paris 4, 2009. http://www.theses.fr/2009PA040231.
This dissertation analyzes the narrative devices and rhetorical techniques used by eighteenth-century novelists in order to play with the expectations of their readers. These authors present their fictional narratives as true accounts. At the same time, however, they use strategies that force the readers to distance themselves from what they read: on the one hand, these authors present a series of literary topoï, which are so familiar to the readers that they can only be taken as a sign of fictionality; and on the other hand, the authors give a series of clues that prevent the readers from believing what is said. This study examines the consequences of these procedures and offers several theoretical hypotheses in order to understand the paradoxical poetics of play. It questions the effects and the implications of this poetics on the reader and proposes the apparently contradictory concept of “fictional truth” as a way to think through the various notions of play in eighteenth-century fiction
Castonguay-Bélanger, Joël. "Les écarts de l'imagination : pratiques et représentations de la science dans le roman au tournant des Lumières (1775-1810)." Thèse, Paris 4, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/18240.
Enriquez, Romain. "L’invention littéraire de l’inconscient dans le récit de fiction (contes, nouvelles, romans) entre 1850 et 1895." Thesis, Paris 4, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017PA040069.
Unlike a set of studies which tack psychoanalytical concepts onto pre-texts, i.e .texts transformed into material for analysis, we study the specific contribution of fiction (novels, tales, short stories, narrative forms…) to the invention of the concept of unconscious. In the second half of the 19th century, the unconscious makes a crucial appearance behind the mask of words (“depth”, “automatic”, “without knowledge”, “obsession”…), topics (dreams, hypnosis, hysteria…), characters (facing personality, behavior or memory disorders…) and narrative voices. Literary history has always gathered writers in “literary movements” embodied in “manifestos”; yet this categorisation collapses under the pressure of this notion or intuition, more difficult to grasp as it proves to be protean. All of them wonder about the depths of artistic creation, the unintended language of the body, the duality or little reality of “ego”; all of them throw a stone without knowing the monument at which they are aiming. From Flaubert to Zola and Huysmans, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Goncourt, Bourget, Maupassant, Dujardin – just to name a few –, we investigate how fiction dialogues with various knowledges (psychophysiology, medicine, philosophy, biology…) and, along with science, how fiction may develop its symbolic arsenal, its hermeneutic register and becomes an epistemological player in its own right. Again, we investigate how literature, in opposition to the speeches skillful with scientific neutrality, operates freely, but not free of ambiguities. Indeed, it involves with reader in the writing of an unconscious not so much described but rather constructed, not so much discovered but rather invented
Wolf, Nelly. "Le devoir democratique en litterature : images du peuple dans le roman sous la troisieme republique : 1890-1939." Paris 3, 1987. http://www.theses.fr/1987PA030087.
During the third republic, the concept of the "people" became common place in certain sectors of the literature of the period. This new democratic tendency lead to a new type of writer and was responsible for the involvment of other authors, such as romain rolland, jules romains, aragon, etc. In the political and cultural debate. But it did not result in any fundamental change in the form of the novel, as realism retained its leading role. Writers were more successful in portraying the peasant than the workman, to take the two most frequently treated subjects. The character of the workman, fixed into a political framework, remained underdeveloped while the peasant as described by ramuz, giono or genevoix served as a basis for a deep reflexion on modern society and civilization. Novels about servants or about criminals of the lower class virtually disappeared from the scene even if authors like proust; or on a minor level, carco, still wrote about these social types successfully. At the same time emerged a new image of ordinary people, office workers leading narrow lives (duhamel), or through pictures of urban and rural life (ayme, dabit, celine). But it is in the use of the language that the novel during this period made the most progress in portraying working classes. Elementary, colloquial french took a more and more important place in the narrative style until the revolution brought by celine made of popular language itself the very basis of modern french literature
Graa, Asma. "L'autofiction au féminin : une relecture de l'identité sexuelle féminine dans la littérature française et francophone au tournant du XXe et XXIe siècle." Thesis, Toulouse 2, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016TOU20130.
What is a feminine identity and what is a sexual identity? This question was widely discussed in order to settle on a precise definition in the light of different approaches such as sociology, psychoanalysis and epistemology. This fad towards the identity concept keeps growing to be a fashion trend. Nevertheless, besides its moving nature, constantly changes its outlines and criteria. The notion of identity is formed according to social and political contexts proper to each society but more importantly to their use by the individual. Thus, along with this identity ferment, we wanted to analyze a set of self-narratives both motley and heterogeneous at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first objective behind this study is to highlight the diversity of women’s writings but also highlight the recursive identity building process through the different approaches used to focus on multiple and federating social contexts in the studies pieces. The multidisciplinary method allowed a permeability to the literature by shifting it further from a holistic to an open and democratic one
Di, Cecco Daniela. "Entre femmes et jeunes filles, le roman pour adolescentes en France et au Québec." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0029/NQ27131.pdf.
Dichamp, Céline. "Du discours médical au récit fantastique : la dimension addictive des drogues dans la littérature française de 1870 à 1914." Thesis, Montpellier 3, 2011. http://www.theses.fr/2011MON30090/document.
The addictive literature appears through addictive substances taken by poets in the middle of the 19th century; it allows a new dimension of writing influenced by drugs. This appears not only in psychiatrists and psychologists but also to artists as a real instrument of mental exploration. Between 1870 and 1914, in the realist and naturalist novel, the addictive and obsessional behavior of fictional characters has significant importance. The aspect of specific dependence to a substance or to an object becomes a literary subject but is dedicated to a specific description of mental phenomena. Dependence is defined as the repetition of certain behavior in order to get some pleasure from a material object or a situation, desired and consumed with greed. We will restrict ourselves in this thesis to work on the addiction of substances at that time: alcohol, morphine, hashish, opium and ether. Fictional invention with scientific intent shows or demonstrates facts in a realistic way in order to inform, warn or theorize by giving a pleasant and artistic appearance. However, the naturalistic author has to stay within the realms of reality without ever corrupting his novel with unchecked information, exaggeration, exuberances which would prevent the text from being credible. Confronted by medical theories and the etiology of dependence, the authors use their imagination to describe the medical phenomena of poisoning and dependence on psychoactive products. [etc.]
Al, Suraihi Abdulrahman. "Le rapport entre l’Histoire et le roman dans les deux derniers volumes des Thibault de Roger Martin du Gard et La Trilogie de Naguib Mahfouz." Thesis, Paris 3, 2011. http://www.theses.fr/2011PA030044.
How is the historical incorporated in the novel and how does this incorporation serve theambition of two novelists who, even though belonging to different cultures, write fictionswhich tell the story of a family through history, and more precisely during the first half of theXXe century? How to understand the relationship between novel and history? Our researchinvestigates how the contamination between them proceeds: between historical facts and theinvented ones, a mutual contamination is used to authenticate the fictive world created by thenovelist, but also to question history. The detailed study of the marks of historicity, namelydates, historical characters and documents, shows us that the fiction historicizes itself, not inrelation to history as an academic genre, but in relation to new writing forms of the press likethe reportage in the case of Roger Martin du Gard and the feuilleton in the case of NaguibMahfouz
Grira, Sarra. "Roman autobiographique et engagement : une antinomie ? (XXe siècle)." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018USPCA017.
How do authors reconcile the desire to share their personal experience — where the “I” is the heart of the work — with the desire to participate in public and political life ? And how can they bring together these two dimensions in the poetic space of fiction, so that neither their biography nor their main thesis end up of overshadowing the work’s novelistic qualities? These are the questions we proposed to examine through five novels: La Maison du Peuple by Louis Guilloux, L’Espoir (“Man’s Hope") by André Malraux, La Conspiration (“The Conspiracy”) by Paul Nizan, Les Mandarins (“The Mandarins”) by Simone de Beauvoir, and Le Premier Homme (“The First Man”) by Albert Camus. We found that, beyond their friendship and their shared battles, these authors also shared similar views on how to reconcile their personal experiences and the causes of their time — with, here and there, their own particularities, which we examined. The confrontation of these works, which range from the 1920s to the late 1950s, with the literary theories that emerged starting in the 1970s attests to the pertinence of questions raised by this socially-conscious literature (and not only on the formal level). Using this corpus for analysis, but without restricting ourselves to it, we examined the questions of poetics and genre raised by the term “autobiographical novel”, techniques of representation and transposition, and the subjectivity inherent to engaged writing. This will lead us to understand how a personal experience can be transformed into an aesthetic exercise and result in an ethics of praxis
Bouanga, Patricia. "L'encyclopédie d’Éric Chevillard." Thesis, Université Grenoble Alpes (ComUE), 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017GREAL028/document.
In this thesis, we aim to contribute to the reading of Eric Chevillard's work by analyzing the relationships between science and litterature. In order to do this, we are interested in questions of insertion and appropriation of foreign discourses in his narrative prose and other writings. In general way, if the questions of interdisciplinarity have been studied through the analysis of some of the author’s novels, this thesis is devoted to the entire work by analyzing the importance and relevance of what should be called chevillard’s encyclopaedism. Using epistemic analysis as a general approach to the links between knowledge and literary discourse, this work attempts to read this dialogical relationship which in fact induces the writer’s relation to science and knowledge. The aim of this thesis is therefore to study this properly poetic concern of knowledge. We thus examine the way in which poetic and romantic language articulates knowledge and implements it. Here, the encyclopaedic approach finally reveals readers to see in his work a continuation of the tendency which, since Flaubert at least, shows a "palimpsestic" appropriation of discourse of knowledge. Especially since, in the narratives studied, this relation to knowledge oscillates between dissertative logic and reflexivity
Belkaïd, Meryem. "L'Effacement du réel dans la fiction policière contemporaine (Tonino Benacquista, Pascal Garnier, Marcus Malte, Fred Vargas et Tanguy Viel)." Phd thesis, Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle - Paris III, 2012. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00911658.
Roberge, Vincent. "L'imaginaire populaire et les écrivains-conteurs du XIXe siècle, étude comparative du conte québécois et du conte breton." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0019/MQ38182.pdf.
Mathieu, Sévérine. "Edition et best-sellers: tentative d'explication du fonctionnement du champ éditorial romanesque français contemporain." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/212527.
Champagne, Blanche. "La femme de gouttière, recueil de nouvelles ; suivi de L'évolution de l'espace féminin dans des nouvelles québécoises des années 1954-1992." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ43053.pdf.
Ben, Amor Amel. "Madame De Genlis romancière et narratrice : entre fiction et histoire : (Mademoiselle de Clermont, La Duchesse de la Vallière, Madame de Maintenon, Mademoiselle de la Fayette, Jeanne de France et Inès de Castro)." Thesis, Montpellier 3, 2010. http://www.theses.fr/2010MON30094.
To be a witness of one’s era, to transmit the knowledge of the past and to restore the bond between a present and a past broken by a great event such as the French Revolution is a work to which Mme de Genlis devoted more than half of her life. In her novels as in her tales and her Memoirs, the notion of time and history develops in the narrative through the topics approached and creates the narrative form. The articulation of the various temporal levels is even more sensitive in the historical novels: Miss de Clermont, The Duchess of The Vallière, Madam de Maintenon, Miss of The La Fayette, Jeanne of France and Inès de Castro. The assumption is to bring to light, on the basis of the "cross reference" such as defined by Paul Ricoeur, " the fiction would borrow as much from history as history borrows from fiction " Mame de Genlis, the novelist, carries us away in bygone times that seem more or less close to us, we follow the destiny of a heroin encompassing a time much larger than her own, that of History. The conviction of the author is that the historical novel is the most favorable one to the development of moral concepts; it is a true study of the human heart and one time moral standards which are proposed in these novels. The life at court exposes, through the behavior of the courtiers, the passions, the virtues and the defects of Men. Mme de Genlis, the narrator, builds narrative structures where, by a subtle play between the time of telling and the time of what is told, follow one another narration of the past and comment at the present; a narrative framework and an embedded narrative. The subject of the six novels is borrowed from History on which are superimposed a more recent historical time, that sometimes unconsciously escapes from the author. It is the time of the mental universe of Mme de Genlis, a reflection of the concerns of her era: the women’s relation with power, the freedom to choose one’s husband, the temptation of the convent, and the happiness in virtue. In spite of the “historical” adjective that her novels do have since they tell the story of a glorified past yet they remain very much related to our present time