Poétisation et déréalisation de la ville au XIXème siècle : les tropes d’une littérature hantée

• Main Author: Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Midi 2009-12-01
• Series: Caliban: French Journal of English Studies
• Subjects: ville; défamiliarisation; poétisation; gothique; hypallage; labyrinthe
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/1622
• ISSN: 2425-6250; 2431-1766

The urban and suburban worlds had become everyday, if not pervasive, realities for many 19th-century Britons, and were increasingly resorted to in the fiction of the times to explore many social, economic or ethical issues. Yet, because of the way they were represented, cities were paradoxically derealized—even in supposedly realistic texts—and turned into dreamlike or fantasy entities with Gothic or mythical qualities.The fact the city was so omnipresent and disturbing while at the same time so familiar or even commonplace probably accounts for the writers’ keeping it at a distance, through derealizing techniques whose stylistic modalities shall here be examined, namely the use in prose works of literary devices that belong to poetic writing—such as metaphors, hypallages and metonymies—in Thomas De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and Poe’s "The Man of the Crowd" (1840). De Quincey’s text represents a watershed, laying the foundations for the art of the city, as will also be the case with Poe’s short story some 20 years later. Both works will enduringly influence Victorian writers—such as Wilkie Collins, Stevenson, Arthur Machen, or Arthur Conan Doyle. This brief diachronic survey does not claim to be exhaustive but merely aims at showing the obsessive and haunting persistence of the same schemes, tropes and symbols—pioneered by De Quincey and Poe—throughout the 19th century, something reminiscent of a Gothic scenario, or a ghost story.