The shadow’s share A novelistic poetics of ambiguity

This article approaches Nodier’s fictional output from the 1800s to the 1820s through the lens of a poetics of ambiguity, whose contours, recurrent motifs, and stylistic invariants are outlined. From the schoolboy libertinism of Moi-même to the ontological split borne by Lothario/Jean Sbogar in the eponymous novel, is it not, above all, a form of painful distance between oneself and oneself and between the ego and history that unites these so very varied works?