An Ecopoetical Approach of Romantic Analogy : Jules Michelet and George Sand

Abstract

This article offers a reading of Jules Michelet’s natural history essays and George Sand’s Voyage dans le cristal through the lenses of ecopoetics. In these two works, ecological thought expresses itself through analogy: either the anthropomorphic representation of animals and nature in Michelet’s, or analogical construction and exploration of nature in Sand’s marvellous tale. Neither in Michelet’s nor in Sand’s the analogy is a rhetorical artefact, rather than the key element of a poetic and a cosmology. The double reading is therefore an invitation for ecocritical theory to take analogical thinking seriously and to see in it a unique representation of the world and a thought experiment leading to a reconfiguration of our relationship to other beings, to natural resources and to the environment.