Stella d’Émeric Bergeaud : une écriture épique de l’histoire

• Main Author: Christiane Ndiaye
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Pléiade (EA 7338) 2009-07-01
• Series: Itinéraires
• Subjects: Haiti; nineteenth century; epic poetics; Haitian Revolution; hybridity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/234

Haitian literature of the nineteenth century has been widely ignored by critics. Even Stella, published in 1859 and unanimously presented by historians as “the first Haitian novel,” has roused little interest, since it is generally considered to be a rather amateur and ambiguous historical novel. This paper attempts to show that Stella is in fact an epic novel, in which Bergeaud “reinvents” the main characteristics of the epic in order to portray the Haitian revolution of 1804. Thus, Bergeaud creates a “hybrid” text, defined mainly by epic poetics but not excluding polyphony and metadiscursive elements, which are considered by literary criticism today as characteristic of the modem (or even the postmodern) novel. From the point of view of current literary theory, Haitian literature thus appears to have been a very modem literature since the very beginning.