Genre

Merveilleux scientifique (also spelled with a hyphen: merveilleux-scientifique, literally translated "scientific marvelous") is a literary genre that developed in France from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. Akin today to science fiction, this literature of scientific imagination revolves around key themes such as mad scientists and their extraordinary inventions, lost worlds, exploration of the solar system, catastrophes and the advent of supermen. Emerging in the wake of Jules Verne's scientific novels, this literary current took shape in the second half of the 19th century, moving away from the Verne model and centering on a new generation of authors such as Albert Robida, Camille Flammarion, J.-H. Rosny aîné and Maurice Renard, the latter claiming the works of the more imaginative novelists Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells as his model. Consequently, in 1909 Renard published a manifesto in which he appropriated a neologism coined in the 19th century, "merveilleux scientifique", adding a hyphen to emphasize the link between the modernization of the fairy tale and the rationalization of the supernatural. Thus defined, the merveilleux-scientifique novel, set within a rational framework, relies on the alteration of a scientific law around which the plot is built, in order to give the reader food for thought by presenting the threats and delights of science. Mainly employed by popular novelists, this genre draws on the sciences and pseudo-sciences that resonate with public opinion, such as radiographic, electrical and biological discoveries. However, despite the theoretical foundation provided by Maurice Renard in 1909, merveilleux-scientifique literature failed to take shape as a literary movement, and in the end constituted no more than a heterogeneous and scattered literary whole. Despite the arrival of a new generation of authors such as José Moselli, René Thévenin, Théo Varlet, Jacques Spitz and André Maurois, this literature failed to renew itself and gradually declined from the 1930s onwards, while at the same time, in the United States, literature of scientific imagination enjoyed great success under the name of "science fiction", with a broadening of its themes. Presented as a new genre, science fiction arrived in France in the 1950s and, seducing French authors and readers, completed the demise of the merveilleux-scientifique current and its generations of writers. A marginal and unassumed genre during the second half of the 20th century, merveilleux scientifique has been the subject of renewed public attention since the late 1990s, thanks to the critical work of a number of researchers and the reappropriation of this forgotten literary genre by authors, particularly in the comic strip medium. Source: Wikipedia (en)

Genre -

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