THE STRUCTURE OF THE FANTÔMAS NOVEL SERIES BY PIERRE SOUVESTRE AND MARCEL ALLAIN AND THE PROBLEM OF SERIALITY IN POPULAR LITERATURE

Journal Title: Studia Litterarum - Year 2017, Vol 2, Issue 4

Abstract

The essay examines the structure of a 32-volume series of Fantômas novels created by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain; it traces the origins and development of the serial genre and generic novelties related to seriality. The latter include a relative autonomy of each story in each volume and interconnection of the volumes via the figure of the criminal “slipping away” from the hands of justice. The study compares poetological techniques of the fabula development and points out specific features of the Belle époque reality as represented through the introduction of recognizable “cultural signs,” variations of everyday incidents, and newspaper chronicle of criminal events. It also analyzes the image of Fantômas and other recurrent characters of the series (such as Juve, Fandor, Hélène, Lady Maud Beltham, etc). The authors examine para-literary features that can be traced in many other different forms such as TV series and graphic novels. They include (1) mythologization of the main character as embodiment of Evil, or a “criminal genius”; (2) confusion of the real and the fictional, verisimilar and extraordinary, horrible and comic based on the variations of literary and journalistic clichés; (3) repetition of plot patterns, (4) attempts to guess and to meet reader’s expectations.

Authors and Affiliations

Kirill A. Chekalov

Keywords

Related Articles

Universal russianness, or Gorky’s the Lower depths interpreted by Zamyatin interpreted by Renoir

This paper discusses a 1936 French film The Lower Depths based on the famous Maxim Gorky’s play and directed by Jean Renoir. The script was initially written by Evgeny Zamyatin and Jacques Companeez and then rewritten...

“YOUR P.C.W.” THE UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF PAUL SCHEERBART TO ERICH MÜHSAM

The archive of a German writer and anarchist Erich Mühsam (1878– 1934) is a signifcant but “unexplored” part of the manuscript collection of the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Scien...

Reexamining Two Mythological Ballads from Christine de Pizan’s Cent Balades

The article analyzes two mythological ballads from Christine de Pizan’s early collection Cent Balades (1399–1411). I propose to interpret them against allegorical commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poem Ovide morali...

THE PROBLEM OF HUMANISM IN M. GORKY’S ESSAY “A. A. BLOK”

The article examines one of the most important problems of Gorky’s work — a problem of humanism. It relates the history of creation of Gorky’s essay “A. A. Blok” (1923) to the author’s reflections about deformation of t...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP26187
  • DOI 10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-4-114-133
  • Views 395
  • Downloads 15

How To Cite

Kirill A. Chekalov (2017). THE STRUCTURE OF THE FANTÔMAS NOVEL SERIES BY PIERRE SOUVESTRE AND MARCEL ALLAIN AND THE PROBLEM OF SERIALITY IN POPULAR LITERATURE. Studia Litterarum, 2(4), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-26187