Description
Cette etude porte sur les discours theoriques et les dispositifs rhetoriques auxquels la fiction de langue anglaise a recours pour se legitimer, dans un contexte de ferme condamnation morale et de mepris de la part des doctes. Ces discours et ces dispositifs se deploient dans des titres, des prefaces et au coeur meme des recits. Les auteurs les mobilisent pour affirmer que leur recit contient une verite morale ou, le plus souvent, pour presenter ce dernier comme un compte rendu factuel. Cette revendication de l'historicite fait intervenir la figure du narrateur temoin, garant de la veracite des faits relates, ainsi que celle de l'editeur de manuscrit, qui s'impose a partir des annees 1700. Avec la parution de "Joseph Andrews" (1742) de Henry Fielding la fiction se met a exhiber sa propre fictionalite: elle devient auto-reflexive.This study explores the theoretical discourses and rhetorical devices used by writers to legitimate fiction at a time when it was considered immoral by theologians and despised by scholars. The use of such discourses and devices is found in titles, prefaces and throughout the narratives themselves; they are employed to assert that the narratives contain moral truths or to assert their status as fact, thus rendering the narratives acceptable to the readership. The claim to factuality is asserted by the figure of the narrator-as-witness, who guarantees the veracity of the facts relayed, and, from 1700 onwards, by that of the manuscript editor. Following the publication of Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" in 1742, the fiction of the period begins to flaunt its own fictionality, marking the emergence of self-reflexive fiction.
