Contenu du sommaire : Histoire et fiction.

Whether historical or literary, narrative discourse has lost a good deal of its credit. Out of concern with conceptual rigor, today's most innovative historians attempt to dispense with it, and the questioning of narrative has perhaps been even more radical with modern and postmodern writers. Yet neither historians nor novelists have given up narrating and probably could not do so without forfeiting their specificity. Far from having exhausted its resources, narrative has been resurging over the past years with fresh energies.

The historicist approach to literary texts has not been in favor during the years when « new criticism », then « deconstruction » dominated the field, compelling critics to assess the very nature of historical discourse. There now seems to be developing in American literary criticism a new historicism which, aware of the perils involved, insists that historical dimensions must be reintroduced on theoretically acceptable grounds.

McTeague's relationship to the social and ideological trends of its time is a complex and contradictory one : on the one hand, Norris is heavily influenced by biological determinism, social darwinism and the cult of true womanhood. On the other, the story of McTeague and Trina shows the values of the time to be traps : the virtues of thrift and industry turn into perversions, the quest for money glorified by the Gospel of wealth drives people to brutality and crime. Is not the novel to be read as an indirect indictment of the greed and violence that prevails in American society at the turn of the century ?

It is important to decide whether Pound can be called a « populist », not only in order to gain a correct ideological perspective on the work of the greatest American poet of this century, but also because such a decision may oblige to redefine the meaning of Populism at large. Pound's statements, which connect his populism to the story of his family, may be very misleading. There are very few traces of real Populism in his efforts to create his own money, they rather tend to describe a pristine and highly individual capitalism. If Pound's family may well sum up American history, it is the inverse movement back to European origins which triggers a parallel delirium for Pound, and provides the link between totalitarianism and the mixture of popular themes which underlie a vulgar brand of Populism. Pound may have been intoxicated by the very mixture, but it is probably safer for us to draw the line between popular paraonia and authentic Populism.

A « poetics of engagement » has constantly underpinned E.L. Doctorow's novelistic projects. The Book of Daniel explores the nature of historical narrative as it is expressed through the making of a fiction based on historical events. « True History », Doctorow would have us consider as interpretation ; he uses his narrator's irony to convey this conviction to the reader.

Revisionist and post-revisionist criticism in the U.S. has striven to re-Americanize the Transcendentalists, by describing them both as the heirs of Puritanism and as the founders of the American Renaissance. This essay offers a new revision of a kind, which is based on two propositions : 1. Emerson's — and his disciples' — view of history is, in many ways, a form of « romantic paramnesia » ; 2. the romantic opposition of myth vs. history enabled them to develop a strategy of disengagement which is in line not with Puritan orthodoxy, but with the antinomian and separatist tradition.

How best to deal with Black Power, a book that has never been viewed as one of Richard Wright's best and that seems flawed as a documentary of emergent political strength, but that was still the product of a journey of obvious importance to him ? Such is the theme of this essay which concludes that the greatest power revealed in the book lies in documenting the perceptions and often the misperceptions of an outsider in a hard to know land.

This essay attempts to show how John Barth's novel LETTERS radically reorients the classical relationship between history and fiction. Shifting from the uncertain representation of the real inside the fiction — and of History within the story — to the more productive notion of the real as a fiction, LETTERS uses the discourse of /and about History as a metaphor of fiction which sheds valuable light on the functioning of the narrative.

Should the Declaration of Independence entail some sort of linguistic independence also from the British ? The question was bound to arise and fed a rather heated debate for many years in the colonies and in the new United States, but also in Great Britain. Webster is one of the heroes of that debate and his own evolution on this point is traced with great care.