Patricia Wentworth est l’auteur trente-deux romans dans lesquels intervient Miss Silver, vieille dame détective, et cet article se penchera sur leur dimension sérielle et sur le rôle central de ce personnage récurrent original et atypique.Il s’agira d’étudier les connotations familiales qui colorent son mode de représentation, la manière dont la famille est omniprésente (in absentia et par le biais d’objets symboliques) dans la vie privée et professionnelle de Miss Silver, faisant constamment se rejoindre et se chevaucher les dimensions intime et féminine (l’intérieur) et policière (l’extérieur, le masculin). J’effectuerai en particulier un gros plan sur l’activité du tricot que pratique la détective dans tous les romans de la série, sur sa signification et son symbolisme pluriels, son rôle de passerelle entre l’extérieur (la détection) et l’intérieur (la famille, l’intime), et sur sa fonction méta-textuelle. Nous verrons que les personnages récurrents (Miss Silver, et les inspecteurs de Scotland Yard Frank Abbott et son chef, Lamb) nous procurent le double plaisir de la répétition (avec variations) et de la familiarité, analysé par Umberto Eco, et nous font nous sentir « en famille » en lisant les romans de la série. Ils s’inscrivent dans un monde en mutation dont ils montrent l’aspect déstabilisant et défamiliarisant et c’est sans doute la raison pour laquelle Miss Silver, d’une manière rassurante, ne semble pas, pour sa part, changer ou vieillir.

Unlike architecture, music is mostly a marginal or infrequent aspect of utopian literature, though usually invested with solely positive connotations. It is however particularly prominent in Samuel Butler's Erewhon but it is only described negatively, as unpleasant, discordant and even cacophonous. This is where Butler's radical originality lies: firstly in this diversion of the laudatory, spiritualized conception of music and of its utopian associations; and secondly in the (re) appropriation of music for satiric and anti-utopian purposes. After a brief survey of the usual role and connotations of music in utopias, this paper will focus on its value and symbolism before the narrator's stay in Erewhon. It will then address its representation in the unknown land that collapses the literal (acoustic) and social meanings of discordance with unpleasant or cacophonous music as the index to a dysfunctional world and its ethical flaws. Lastly, the article will deal with the narrator's unstable stance and views, which, together with the generic and tonal hybridity of the text and its ironic logic, alternating between satire and (anti) utopia, make the novel go through a series of perplexing ideological fluctuations. Like the cacophonous music of Erewhon, the message conveyed is ultimately ambiguous and at times discordant.

Despite their growing importance in Victorian society, machines are underrepresented in 'industrial' or 'social problem' fiction. H. G. Wells's short stories and novellas of the 1890s are a notable exception. While 'The Cone' is indebted to the mid-Victorian (cautionary) tradition and especially to Dickens's Hard Times, these features are inflected in an innovative and pioneering way mainly due to the text's unprecedented generic hybridity. The industrial sublime coexists with a generalized sense of melancholy, shown as the new social disease affecting middle-class characters-and no longer the working-class underdogs or 'Hands' of previous texts-in a disfigured world deserted by God. 'The Cone' could be called an 'industrial romance', a category subsuming its genera mixta status: its convincing, realistic substratum (the industrial world of the 1890s in the Newcastle area), its love (and revenge) plot within an industrial context, the presence of dark Biblical symbolism within the realistic mode, and an approach to the human psyche inspired from contemporary psychological research and formulated through the uncanny. The realistic descriptive regime is inflected by a fantastic form of poetics fostered by complex images of repression and voracious orality whereby the figurations of the industrial setting and its omnipresent machinery serve as indirect psychological expressions, both of the unknown depths of an individual's psyche (Horrocks's) and of a large-scale collective crisis, so that machinery also turns out to be the tragic paradigm of late Victorian industrial society.

P. G. Wodehouse has long been neglected, if not ostracised, by academia and critics, because of a persistent prejudice against light writing and reading. He was (re)discovered from 2000 onwards, a period corresponding to a new critical awareness that aesthetics and ideology cannot be understood in isolation, and that ‘levity’ does not necessarily mean shallowness. This paper will analyse the modalities of comedy and humour in The Code of the Woosters—particularly the burlesque and mock-heroic diversion of the proliferating classical and Biblical intertexts, as well as the subversive use of parody, by Bertie Wooster, the falsely naïve first-person narrator who often plays the role of his creator’s spokesman. Wodehouse’s comic stories and hugely enjoyable style have an often unperceived or ignored ideological and satirical subtext. He was undeniably a comic genius but no mere ‘entertainer’. His novels operate both comic and iconoclastic attacks on gender roles, class relations and the canon. There is actually more complexity, more ‘thoughtful lightness’ to his works than he had so far been credited with.

La Puissance affective de l'hypallage : l'emotion reticente, deplacee et intensifiee dans Affliction of Childhood (1845) de Thomas De Quincey et Reunion (1982) de Julie Schumacher Le texte autobiographique de T. De Quincey et la nouvelle semi-autobiographique de J. Schumacher sont des recits poignants lies a la maladie et a la perte d'etres aimes. Le fosse entre l'epoque de ces histoires vecues pendant l'enfance et celle de leur mise en recit (des annees pour la narratrice de Schumacher, voire des decennies plus tard pour De Quincey), et leur impact emotionnel devastateur, jouent un role preponderant. En effet, les deux logiques temporelles superposees (celle du sujet d'alors/ celle du narrateur) s'accompagnent d'une persistance de la souffrance qui perturbe la dynamique chronologique attendue. Malgre les nombreuses annees ecoulees, les recits continuent a etre travailles par la logique souterraine du deuil (jamais termine) et du trauma que cristallise la figure tres ambigue de l'hypallage, en l'occurrence des adieux mutiles chez De Quincey et des croutes de pizza mutilees chez Schumacher. Le statut d'hypallage de ces deux adjectifs insolites n'est pas immediatement perceptible (notamment en raison de leur positionnement chronologique decale) et se construit peu a peu pour le lecteur, a la lumiere d'une connaissance panoramique des recits (et de relectures). Nous comprenons alors que ces hypallages, initialement discretes, sont en fait des concentres d'emotion, et les points nevralgiques des deux textes. La mutilation projetee sur des objets (adieux, pizza) semble attenuer et mettre a distance la souffrance du sujet. Mais en realite, ces hypallages au fonctionnement metonymique et metaphorique complexe, semblables a des palimpsestes affectifs et textuels, cristallisent, font reverberer, et intensifient l'emotion, y compris pour le lecteur. The Affective Power of Hypallage: the Reticent, Displaced and Heightened Expression of Emotion in Thomas De Quincey's Affliction of Childhood (1845) and Julie Schumacher's Reunion (1982) T. De Quincey's autobiographical text and J. Schumacher's semi-autobiographical story are poignant narratives hinging on the disease and loss of beloved ones. The events were experienced in childhood but were not narrated until years (Schumacher) or even decades (De Quincey) afterwards. This long time gap, and the devastating emotional consequences of these early experiences of death play a central role in narrative construction, whereby the superimposition of two temporal logics (the young subject's vs. the adult narrator's), along with the persistence of grief disturb the expected chronological dynamics. Although the experiences go back to the narrator's childhood, the narratives are still tormented and shaped by the subterranean traumatic logic of incomplete and impossible mourning. This logic is crystallized by the very ambiguous figure of hypallage — (De Quincey) and the of a pizza (Schumacher). Because of its chronologically displaced occurrence, we do not immediately interpret the unusual presence of the adjective mutilated as a case of hypallage. Its status as such gradually emerges as we read the texts again and thereby acquire a more panoramic knowledge of them. This is when we realize that these initially discreet instances of hypallage are actually saturated with affects and represent what may be seen as the neuralgic loci of both texts. Objectifying mutilation by projecting it onto farewells or crusts of pizza might seem to ease the subject's pain and keep it at a distance. Yet, this complex metonymic and metaphoric use of the hypallage shows that it is in fact an affective and textual palimpsest. It condenses and heightens emotion (including the reader's) and makes it reverberate endlessly.

La signification et le symbolisme de l’or, dans l’Antiquité, dans diverses mythologies du monde, ou dans la Bible, ont toujours été ambivalents car ce métal précieux et inaltérable possède une valeur monétaire et spirituelle. Il symbolise tantôt l’innocence originelle, tantôt l’immortalité et l’élévation spirituelle en raison de sa parenté avec le soleil, mais aussi la perfection et l’idéal, ce qui explique la quête de nombreux héros (la toison d’or, les pommes d’or du jardin des Hespérides, l’or du Rhin, etc.). Mais si le soleil est source de vie, il peut aussi brûler et détruire. De même, l’or est un métal parfait mais parfois un cadeau empoisonné qui engendre la cupidité et la discorde. Il peut faire le malheur de l’homme et l’asservir, comme dans la légende du roi Midas, et il peut aussi tuer.Toutes ces valeurs de l’or sont présentes dans l’art et la littérature du XIXe siècle qui comportent de nombreux échos intertextuels des récits mythologiques et bibliques mais se réapproprient cet héritage ancestral et l’adaptent au nouveau contexte esthétique, social, économique et idéologique de l’époque victorienne pour aborder les problèmes contemporains. Les maux engendrés par la nouvelle philosophie capitaliste à l’ère industrielle infléchissent donc le traitement de l’or dans les textes de George Eliot, Bram Stoker et George du Maurier. Dans son essai de 1860, « Les Veines de la richesse », Ruskin s’insurgeait contre l’iniquité du système, et dénonçait les effets déshumanisants et délétères de la nouvelle « économie mercantile » dont certains « trésors » étaient « gorgés de larmes humaines ». Il considérait que « certains types d’or » avaient au soleil « un éclat plus brillant que leur véritable essence ». Cet essai fait se rejoindre le métaphorique (le corps social) et le littéral (le corps des travailleurs) et postule que « la circulation de la richesse d’une nation ressemble à celle du sang dans un corps vivant », annonçant le traitement très métaphorique et métonymique que Eliot, Stoker et du Maurier donnent de l’or, et la façon dont ils soulignent sa valeur et son pouvoir ambigus au sein de la nouvelle culture capitaliste. Dans Silas Marner, dans la nouvelle de Stoker, et dans Trilby, l’or possède une signification concrète et abstraite (symbolique). Au sens propre, comme figuré, il est incarné par les cheveux des personnages féminins (Eliot et Stoker) et par la « voix en or » de Trilby. La poétique complexe mise en œuvre dans les trois textes – l’or qui coule, qui pousse, qui se change en musique, qui devient un creuset alchimique ou une puissance meurtrière – donne toute la mesure de sa complexité. En effet, son humanisation apparente (et sa féminisation) coexistent avec la réification (effective ou potentielle), voire l’instrumentalisation, d’êtres humains, état de fait engendré par la nouvelle économie « mercantile ».

Thomas De Quincey was a distinguished classicist who appropriated the Greek antique heritage in his works, both formally and thematically. Some of his texts are informed by rhetorical and oratorical models, as had often been the case for didactic essays from the early 17th century onwards in Britain. But De Quincey's originality lies elsewhere, since this rhetoric, as an instrument ensuring measure and (self-) control, is at odds with his groundbreaking (and uncanny) resort to Greek tragic models (Sophocles and Euripides, in particular) in his autobiographical texts. He pioneered the use of the Greek tragic heritage as the expression of dysfunctional family relationships, personal emotional trouble and trauma.The figure of Orestes in The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and above all that of Oedipus which literally haunts his autobiographical works and even features in some of his essays, represent his own uncanny doubles. explicitly in the case of Orestes, and in a barely disguised way in that of Oedipus. This diverting, or even twisting, of the classical heritage for introspection purposes was quite unprecedented but is also deeply illuminating.Stylistically, thematically and ideologically, the "law of antagonism" that was the cornerstone of De Quincey's conception of existence, also shapes his works, with a permanent tension between balance and control (achieved through classic rhetoric) and the emotional violence, and the threat of disintegration (expressed by the Greek tragic paradigms). The paper highlights the radically new use of the (fantasized) tragic figures of Orestes and Oedipus as autobiographical vehicles, showing how they serve as the filters through which the author revisits his painful childhood and youth, his disturbed relationship with his mother, and represents them reticently and obliquely.

This paper will examine the meaning and modalities of travelling and « the horizon » in five ghost stories from M. R. James’s 1904 collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary featuring erudite Englishmen, most of whom Oxbridge academics and researchers, specialising in archaeology or history. These prim and fussy bachelors embark on their scholarly field studies in a very buoyant mood, hoping to make key discoveries in situ although the prospect of travelling somewhat disturbs them, the more so as four out of five of them have to go abroad and stay at foreign inns or hotels... As a matter of fact, James perpetuates the period Gothic tradition whereby foreign countries — and more especially « Papist » ones — symbolise danger and threat. Moreover, as could be expected in ghost stories, in which anxiety and terror are prerequisites of the genre, the characters’ journeys will not have gratifying intellectual results but will be traumatic and lead to unpalatable intimate discoveries. All five characters experience something terrifying, descend into literal and metaphoric depths, and one of them even meets his death because of it. But ironically, even if the things or creatures that menace them initially seem alien to them, they turn out to be part of them, as in Freud’s uncanny.

Le propos de cet ouvrage qui se penche sur la fiction britannique populaire (roman gothique et roman a sensation) des annees 1790 a 1860 est de decoder les « discours de la temporalite » qui y sont « encodes » et de montrer comment les œuvres dramatisent et mettent en recit les inquietudes inspirees par une conception nouvelle du temps. Albright analyse l’impact psychologique et litteraire de ces bouleversements divers d’ordre politique (Revolution francaise), d’ordre scientifique (les decouv...

With George Cruikshank's famous engraving London Going out of Town. The March of Bricks and Mortar (1829), that gives a nightmare, fantastic image of the ravages of urbanization, we can notice the innovative resort to the Gothic to deal with modern phenomena, something as yet unprecedented in the arts, and a device that will also be used by Dickens in the 1850s and 60s to evoke the railway. However, this recourse to the Gothic represents a paradox as the Gothic is supposed to belong to the dark, distant, uncivilized medieval past and it is here used to describe the new living conditions of the industrial era, and the growth of technology. Somehow, it seems logical to resort to the linguistic and symbolic tools of the uncanny to represent new, unknown and destabilizing realities, as in « The Signal-Man ». But what appears more surprising and paradoxical is the use of archaic elements, such as myth, and teratological images—as in Dombey and Son—to depict modernity. The reason may lie in the fact that trains or factories, belching fumes and staining everything about them, were seen as dangerous, all-powerful, voracious monsters and that writers were powerless in front of such disturbing, unprecedented phenomena and had to fall back on familiar, reassuring narrative techniques to come to terms with them. Describing new facts of life with old tools—this is the central paradox and the essential originality of Dickens's fiction on the railway.

The urban and suburban worlds had become everyday, if not pervasive, realities for many 19th-century Britons, and were increasingly resorted to in the fiction of the times to explore many social, economic or ethical issues. Yet, because of the way they were represented, cities were paradoxically derealized—even in supposedly realistic texts—and turned into dreamlike or fantasy entities with Gothic or mythical qualities.The fact the city was so omnipresent and disturbing while at the same time so familiar or even commonplace probably accounts for the writers’ keeping it at a distance, through derealizing techniques whose stylistic modalities shall here be examined, namely the use in prose works of literary devices that belong to poetic writing—such as metaphors, hypallages and metonymies—in Thomas De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and Poe’s "The Man of the Crowd" (1840). De Quincey’s text represents a watershed, laying the foundations for the art of the city, as will also be the case with Poe’s short story some 20 years later. Both works will enduringly influence Victorian writers—such as Wilkie Collins, Stevenson, Arthur Machen, or Arthur Conan Doyle. This brief diachronic survey does not claim to be exhaustive but merely aims at showing the obsessive and haunting persistence of the same schemes, tropes and symbols—pioneered by De Quincey and Poe—throughout the 19th century, something reminiscent of a Gothic scenario, or a ghost story.

The 19th century city, in real life and fiction alike, concentrated and crystallized society's most deep-seated fears and became a favourite locale for anxiety and anguish. The City of Dreadful Night (1874) by James Thomson (1834-1882) Obviously belongs to the literary tradition of the "dark city" which spans the whole century, from Blake and De Quincey on. Thomson's nameless but emblematic "city", as the definite article in the title shows, gathers many tropes already featured in previous texts-the labyrinth, darkness and gloom, the figure of the wanderer. It then forms a literary, pictorial and autobiographical palimpsest, under the aegis of Durer's Melencolia (1514). However, the poem conjures up a distorted and hallucinated image of London and Thomson's atheism and pessimism-quite akin to Schopenhauer's-make his nightmarish and crepuscular "city" stand out against the mainstream. Although its form is largely indebted to 19th century poetic codes, the mood of The City surprisingly predates the 20th century sense of the tragic and the absurd. One of the epigraphs is drawn from Dante's Inferno, but in the poem, hell has nothing to do with the punishment the damned undergo in the world beyond. It is actually the lot of the living, doomed to endless wandering, without any hope of a better hereafter. Thomson's city, contaminated by a mysterious disease, haunted by fear, is a self-enclosed, solipsistic, meaningless world, a world without God or ideals. It offers a despairing allegory of the "hell of modernity". And in this doomed world, the most frightening thing is not so much death as life...