A rivalry of storytellers The art of the novel in Nerval and Dumas during the epoch of the “industrial literature”

The article seeks to show that Jemmy can be read as a « response » (in the sense Jauß uses it) to Chateaubriand’s Les Natchez (1826). The short tale echoes the novel, featuring, however, a female protagonist and a happy ending : Jemmy succeeds wherever René fails, yet at the cost of the Europeanization of her tribe. The irony pervading the text serves a double function : to compose a parodistic counterpoint to Les Natchez and to unmask the hypocrisy of the romantic myth of the « bon sauvage ».