Literary Responses to the trauma of the French Revolution

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The French Revolution is seen by literary scholars as marking a watershed between the literary production of the Ancien Régime and that of the 19th century. There is generally a consensus that history and literature are not in step with each other as only a small number of literary texts from the 1790s appear to engage directly with the events of the Revolution. Historians, on the other hand, do see literature as reflecting changing mentalities during this decade and believe that the Revolution does have a revolutionising effect on fiction. This study will try to reconcile these two viewpoints by taking a much broader view of literary production of the Revolutionary decade than other literary specialists, and in particular by studying those literary works which appear to have nothing to do with the historical reality surrounding their creation. I will be using the theory of trauma studies as a way of exploring the apparent contradiction between the proliferation of apparently non-poltical literary texts such pastoral novels or moral tales (both forms prevalent in the pre-Revolutionary period) and the events of the Revolution. Trauma theorists have established a series of stages through which the traumatised need to pass before they can fully articulate what they have experienced. Parallels between these psychological stages and the types of fiction most common at the beginning of the Revolution, during the Terror and in the post-Robespierre period suggest that trauma theory might allow us to explore the fiction of the Revolution and its apparent contradictions in a way that has not been done before. This project will provide a valuable new reading of the development of French aesthetic production at a key period in French history and open up new avenues of research into writers and writing during the Revolution.