La Révolution française, 1789-1800, et ses effets sur la production et migration des récits à travers les littératures française, anglaise américaine et italienne /

The present work attempts to study the modes and instances through which the French Revolution is represented within a corpus of selected novels published between 1789 and 1800 in four national literatures, namely the French, English, American and Italian. By applying a methodology which defines itself as both sociological and narratological, we have sought to reevaluate a period traditionally excluded from literary historiography, by means of a survey and a listing of the novelistic fiction produced in the four fields. We have then inserted our quantitative data which clearly shows the steady growth in the production of novels as well as in the reading public during the 1790's, within the context of pre-revolutionary novelistic discourse from about 1760 onwards.Our overall aim has then been to set up a general typology of literary narratives produced during the revolutionary period according to the model of circulation and reception of works which tends to establish the problematic implications of each text as well as its degree of conformity to narrative conventions canonized by tradition, so as to point out each instance in which a narrative emergence or displacement of literary themes has given rise to a representation of the French Revolution