Revisiting Sainte-Beuve’s judgment that Nodier, a theorist of “character types in literature,” had failed to invent any of these in his early novels, this article examines the strategies Nodier uses circa 1830 to place his early career as a Wertherian in a literary history of his own. His paradoxical exemplarity would lie less in the solitary invention of types than in the historical attestation of a generational emulation of consecrated types.
CLIL theme: 4027 -- SCIENCES HUMAINES ET SOCIALES, LETTRES -- Lettres et Sciences du langage -- Lettres -- Etudes littéraires générales et thématiques