La consommation de chocolat et ses topoï dans la fiction des Lumières

This article investigates chocolate in Ancien Régime society through a selection of treatises, dictionaries, and novels from the Enlightenment. These texts provide valuable information on its benefits, preparation, and consumption – revealing new dietary as well as social rituals, closely linked to the libertine imagination. In addition, the novels inform the evolution of descriptive practices. The analysis of short excerpts enables us to propose a few topoi, such as “to take one’s chocolate,” “to invite to take chocolate,” “to feel pleasure with chocolate” or “(to attempt) to administer poison or narcotic in chocolate.”

Topique du cannibalisme et ensauvagement de l’Africain dans les discours européens

In descriptions of European travel narratives since the 16th century, representations of the African are indistinguishable from those of other "savages" whose newly discovered lives both fascinate and repel. In the 18th century, even as allusions to New World cannibalism tended to dissipate, and the image of the "good savage" developed, the cannibalistic discourse on Africa continued to expand. This work proposes to observe how it emerges and spreads in European texts. In other words, the formation of this discourse on the other will be questionned in order to perhaps understand how it became fixated on the African: imaginary discourse, no doubt, but whose contagion still contaminates today’s perception of Blackness as otherness, and informs the persistent discourse of his perceived wildness.

Potentialités narratives de la nourriture : les choix d’Isabelle de Charrière

In Isabelle de Charrière's novels, there are repeated scenes of meals where the protagonists talk about eating. The novelist uses them to characterize her characters and to create situations, which allow her to illustrate her theses. The confrontation between the correspondence - currently being digitized - and the novels clearly shows this link between her democratic convictions (expressed in some of the letters) and their staging, aiming to reach a wider audience.

Le coeur mangé à plusieurs sauces

The « eaten heart » is a scandalous meal that is to be found in literature from its very start. This story rests on various narrative configurations and topoï rooted in a triangular relationship. The heroine’s lover offers her his heart. But her husband turns it into a dish. She actually enjoys this dish but dies as soon as she finds out that she ate her lovers heart. This study follows the variations of the topos both through time and literary genres from the troubadours’s courtly poems all the way to Sade’s pervers stories. The tragical subject matter also triggered parodies, who either magnified the cannibalism or rejected the appalling meal, preferring a comical resolution. It appears however that from the Middle Ages to the dawn of Romanticism lovers show very little appetite. Their amorous communion truly transcends all greedy misfortunes of this world.

Représentations du corps ivre dans la littérature et la peinture hispaniques

Wine has been linked to Spanish culture since the time of the Romans and early Christianity. In Spain, a land of vines since antiquity, the representation of the drunken body in literature and painting is an omnipresent topos since the Middle Ages. The pros and cons of this are found in medical, philosophical, moral and religious texts, but especially in novels, which warn against excess. This article studies how Spanish painters and writers developed the imaginary of wine in all its forms, be they masculine or feminine, solar or twilight, enthusiastic or drowsy, in their reflections, in their drawings and paintings, in poems or novels, in order to transmit the ideological transformation that was going to occur in Spain around this drink. For only the artist seems to preserve the tradition of the divine origin of wine, reclaiming its thaumaturgical role thanks to the Bacchic nectar. Spanish men and women suffer or benefit from the virtues of wine, the main alcoholic beverage in Spain until the 21st century.

Nourritures terrestres, nourritures célestes et rhétorique du sublime dans l'art de Bossuet panégyriste

In the Panegyrics of saint Gorgon, Bossuet uses the topics of eating and drinking, and changes its meaning under the paradigm of catholic dogma : it doesn't help any more to express humiliation, but to express the greatness of christianism. This paradoxical construction of christian sublime forms the bedrock of an approach of language as eating and digesting : the topical construction raises the legendary aspect of the narrative of martyrdom - a border case of narrative fiction -, which is itself a component of the poetics of panegyric.

À la table d'Apollon : de l'abondance à la modération dans Francion

The first edition of the Histoire comique de Francion by Charles Sorel (1623) contains numerous references to the eating and drinking. My study examines narrative sequences focused on a fluctuation between deprivation and abundance, frustration and jouissance. In addition to the domain of food, I consider allusions to sexuality and knowledge, insofar as they share the same narrative paradigm, and shed light on each other. This analysis also shows how Sorel relates ambivalent references to food to some of his moral claims, expressed through subversive uses of the tradition of comic fiction. The four books added for the 1626 and 1633 editions of Francion can be perceived as a wavering attempt to displace Bacchus, who presides over the protagonist’s birth and is emblematic of the various immoderations in the first edition.

Food, Drink and the Other: Producing Satire and Otherness in Portuguese Literature

Portuguese narrative fiction is plentiful of food and drink references, which vary in meaning and function accordingly to the historical context of production. The peripathetic Portuguese brought culinary knowledge from abroad mainly since the 16th century, merging cultural changes of food and drink with practices from their country of origin. This was a turning point in the history of Portuguese narrative fiction, for it made more present the concept of the "other" through consumption habits. An extremely short travel between 16th and 19th narrrative fiction examples intends to highlight some uses of food and drink as topoi in historical and cultural context, asserting the relevance of this resource to articulate identities and alterities.