The ‘Shakespearean’ roots of Stendhal’s forests

Author(s)

  • Ferdinand Breffi Sorbonne University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51777/relief19409

Keywords:

Stendhal, forest, William Shakespeare, innutrition, Ann Radcliffe, romanticism, gothic novel

Abstract

The ecopoetic approach examines the suggestive power of the forest as a major setting in Stendhal's last completed fictions, written in 1838 and 1839. By identifying the progressive layers in the construction of such an object, this analysis will reveal the intimate relationship between the author and the image of the forest, and how this personal construction intertwines with his own Shakespearean imagination. What particular suggestive power does the forest possess under the novelist's pen? How can we understand the use of this natural space in fiction, and where do we draw the line between the possible referential function of the place and its poetic power, which paradoxically only becomes apparent to the reader of the novel when the author's own imagination is taken into account?

Author Biography

  • Ferdinand Breffi, Sorbonne University

    Ferdinand Breffi, PhD, is a senior professor of Modern Literature, qualified lecturer in Comparative Literatures and a secondary school teacher. His research focuses on the notion of “innutrition" in literature and arts. In 2019, he defended a thesis on “Stendhal, Shakespeare and The Charterhouse of Parma” (Sorbonne University, under the direction of François Lecercle). This work won the Young Researcher prize from the “Association des Amis de Stendhal”. Several articles drawn from this research have been published in  HB - Revue Internationale d'études stendhaliennes. In May 2023, during the seminar “Dire/écrire le vivant” at the University of Avignon, he presented an eco-poetic approach of the Stendhalian “forest”, which forms the basis of the current article.

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Published

2024-07-15

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2024): At the School of Life: teaching literature with environmental humanities

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Ferdinand Breffi

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

Breffi, F. (2024) “The ‘Shakespearean’ roots of Stendhal’s forests”, RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 18(1), pp. 168–186. doi:10.51777/relief19409.