Le roman symboliste

Valérie Michelet Jacquod analyzes the paradoxical nature of the Symbolist novels that appeared between 1887 and 1895. These works were often criticized or rejected because of their contradictory place between the fictional realism of novels and Symbolism's rejection of narrative in favor of language. Artists such as Dujardin, Gide, Gourmont and Schwob chose to transform these contradictions into a literary subject, illustrating the "extreme consciousness" of Symbolism and discussing the idealism, autonomy of language, and other foundations of symbolic poetry. The novel of "extreme consciousness" was in fact a major link in the renewal of a genre that paradoxically never ceased to think about its limits. French text.