La ville criminelle dans les grands cycles romanesques de 1840 à 1860 : stratégies narratives et clichés
Our thesis studies Eugène Sue’s “Mystères de Paris” (1842-1843) and the “romans-feuilletons” that have tried to gain profit out of its success. The “urban mysteries” make use of repetition as a much-developed narrative strategy: they intend to differentiate themselves while repeating. Our thesis shines light on the manners in which clichés and agreed scenarios are used and modified to fictionalize the big city, according to an acute awareness to new realities, first of which are the discovery of the proletariat, the fascination with modernity, and the fear of urban criminality. Our thesis presents a panoramic shot of the cultural horizons convened by the urban mysteries, a typology of the criminal characters, and the scrutiny of the construction of the reader by the novel – and of the novel by the reader. This thesis reveals a poetics of the urban mysteries stemming from and anchored within a precise sociohistorical moment, yet endowed with considerable reach and surprising endurance.
Roman Études narratives Cliché Crime Romanticism Novel Narrative studies Sociocritics Mass media Cliché Crime City