Vol. 18 No. 2 (2024): The Literarization of Heritage

Edited by Mathilde Labbé and Marcela Scibiorska

Literature has been part of France's national heritage since the nineteenth century, and as a result it has been given the ability to give heritage status to other objects as well. As such, it is often used to legitimise and promote works, places, discourses, practices and individuals. Citations, figurations, evocations: literary works circulate outside the field from which they originate, carrying with them values, imaginaries and connotations that are reinvested in the objects that actualise them. It is generally on their symbolic capital, rather than their critical function, that the operations of selection, but also of conservation, mediation or transmission that contribute to this process of patrimonialisation are based. 

But how are we to understand the transfers of value that underpin these exchanges when literature is mobilised to defend objects that are part of a heritage that has been or is being built up, and therefore part of an economy of singularities? Beyond the dynamics of legitimisation, this special issue aims to explore the economic, emotional, communicational and political implications of mobilising literature in the space of the art book, the museum, the monument or the nature reserve. Its aim is to analyse the relationships of exhibition, promotion and instrumentalisation between literature and heritage, and to find out whether it is possible to identify any structural characteristics. The issue looks at the way in which these mobilisations redefine the functions of literature and ultimately contribute to heritage inflation, notably through the development of a multi-faceted form of literary tourism, which can be found in exhibitions, around national monuments, in luxury hotels or on cultural walks.