The novelist as an intellectual. The public function of the serialized novel in nineteenth-century France

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to elucidate some of the historical and intellectual conditions that led to the serialized novel collaborating in the emergence of the public intellectual. To this end, the article traces, from nineteenth century French literary texts and historiographical works, the correlation between history and literature. By recovering the investigations that have accounted for the appearance of the serialized novel and the type of reader it produced, it is possible to demonstrate the relationship between the press and the serialized novel for the future of the intellectual. Consequently, this article investigates the production conditions of the new literary forms that emerged with the massification of the newspaper: the serialized novel. The article is divided into three parts. The first part is a study on the emergence of the serialized novel and the mystery novel as a result of the new process of production and popularization of the press. The second part proposes the figure of the novelist as the first public intellectual. The third part redefines the term intellectual to establish the implications of the social ethic of the intellectual novelist as a press for current literary history. This reflection is situated within the framework of the social conflict that arose after the Dreyfus case, a historical moment in which the public intellectual emerged.