Literary Responses to the trauma of the French Revolution

法国大革命被文学学者视为古代革命和19世纪文学作品之间的分水岭。人们普遍认为，历史和文学并不同步，因为从18世纪90年代开始，只有少数文学作品似乎直接与大革命事件有关。另一方面，历史学家确实认为文学反映了这十年来人们心态的变化，并相信大革命对小说产生了革命性的影响。本研究将试图通过比其他文学专家更广泛地看待革命十年的文学作品来调和这两种观点，特别是通过研究那些似乎与创作周围的历史现实无关的文学作品。我将使用创伤研究理论作为一种探索明显非政治文学文本(如田园小说或道德故事（这两种形式在革命前时期普遍存在）与革命事件之间的明显矛盾的方式。创伤理论家已经建立了一系列的阶段，受创伤的人需要通过这些阶段，才能完全说出他们所经历的事情。这些心理阶段与大革命初期、恐怖时期和后罗伯斯庇尔时期最常见的小说类型之间的相似之处表明，创伤理论可能使我们能够以一种前所未有的方式探索革命小说及其明显的矛盾。该项目将在法国历史的关键时期为法国美学生产的发展提供有价值的新阅读，并为研究大革命时期的作家和写作开辟新的途径。

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.