Abstract
In Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Le Dessous de cartes d’une partie de whist, literary creation corresponds to socio-political reality on several levels. The novella recounts the violent death of a young girl, set against a backdrop of historical events leading to both the destitution of the nobility and its symbolic demise in its exclusion from Modernity. This mise en scène of history appears to function as more than a social decor in that it informs the entire narrative structure. The fiction aligns itself with the social transformations underlining the first half of the Nineteenth century, becoming a figurative duplication of historical reality. The present study proposes to examine the process by which narration appears to serve history and to suggest a reading of this fourth Diabolique from an allegorical perspective. Concurrently, it examines the effects of the incursion of social determinism, a distinctive trait of the realist novel, in a text clearly associated with the poetics of Romanticism. Embracing two competing modes of representation—two rival literary esthetics—Le Dessous de cartes d’une partie de whist thus demonstrates a generic ambiguity.
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Ouvrages cités
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Vassilev, K. Histoire et fiction dans Le Dessous de cartes d’une partie de whist de Barbey d’Aurevilly. Neophilologus 93, 581–601 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-009-9162-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-009-9162-z