A. Vaillant, The Art of Literature: Romanticism and Modernity - Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics

French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Vaillant, The Art of Literature: Romanticism and Modernity
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics

Alain Vaillant

The Art of Literature: Romanticism and Modernity

Paris, Classiques Garnier, coll. Romantic and Nineteenth-Century Studies, 2016

EAN : 9782812436505

391 pages

Price : €39

Read an excerpt in the Atelier.

Publisher's description:

Literature was doubly put to the test in the 19th century, by the decline of the rhetorical tradition and the emergence of our media-driven civilization. The writer then decided that art would be his Noah's Ark, inventing an aesthetics of subjectivization, henceforth marked by a paradoxical laughter.

Table of Contents

The Art of Literature. Romanticism and Modernity

Preamble

Part One – Poetry Set Free.

1 – Toward a Poetics of Syllabic Verse.

2 – Between Text and Voice: The Poetic Alchemy of Sounds.

3 – The Lyricism of Verse.

4 – Hugo's Verse, “like a shred of sound”.

5 – Rimbaud, Poet-Versifier.

6 – Mallarmé and His Oversized Flowers.

Part Two – The Art of Fiction.

7 – The Beauty of the Real.

8 – The Balzacian Novel, or the Mathematical Science of Man.

9 – Théophile Gautier or the Specter of History.

10 – The Art of the Realist Novel: A Polyphonic Ventriloquism

11 – The Naturalist Novel, or Literature-as-Journal.

Part Three – The Passion for Laughter.

12 – Balzac the Materialist, Philosophical Joker.

13 – Bon Han, Mal Han.

14 – Hugo, Esthete of Laughter.

15 – The Lyricism of Irony.

16 – Rimbaud, Poet-Clown.

During the nineteenth century, literature was put to the test by the decline of the rhetorical tradition and the emergence of a media-driven civilization. Alain Vaillant explores these developments in The Art of Literature: Romanticism and Modernity, considering the artistic strategies and aesthetics that emerged during this period of significant cultural shift.

Readers interested in nineteenth-century French literature and the evolution of literary aesthetics may find this study relevant. The volume's table of contents indicates that it addresses poetic expression, narrative techniques in fiction, and the role of laughter and irony across works by various nineteenth-century authors.