Du roman sentimental au « roman identitaire » au féminin. Réflexions sur la redéfinition d’un genre au Tournant des Lumières

This article analyses three novels from the turn of the Enlightenment that focus on the life of a woman: Adélaïde de Souza’s Adèle de Sénange (1794), Félicité de Genlis’s La femme auteur (1802), and Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1824). Although different in several respects, these three texts allow us to re-examine the centrality of women’s writing in the literary melting pot of the period. These novels also allow us to question the psychological forces behind the flowering of the novelistic genre in the post-revolutionary period in France, with regard to the formative and identity-building function of literary writing. Each in her own way, these women writers bear witness to a new relationship between history, literature and the social role of women emerging at the dawn of the French realism period.