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The Hero in France and in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Bernard Poli
Affiliation:
University of Paris

Extract

Renart the fox, D'Artagnan the musketeer, ambitious young men like Rastignac or Julien Sorel are usually described in France as universal types and yet they strike the foreign observer as typically French. Conversely, who could say that Huck Finn, Sister Carrie, Joe Christmas or Frederick Henry are anything but American, though their stories have been read and made emblematic of the human fate in numerous foreign countries? There seem to exist subliminal signals which give readers at home the shock of recognition, and also denote the foreignness of a character when seen from distant shores.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1968

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References

page 228 note 1 ‘Nominalists and Realists’, Essays (Everyman Library edition), pp. 325–6Google Scholar.

page 230 note 1 ‘The Over-Soul’, op. cit. p. 166.

page 234 note 1 ‘Character’, op. cit. pp. 252–3.

page 235 note 1 ‘The Over-Soul’, op. cit. p. 153.

page 236 note 1 ‘Prudence’ op. cit. p. 125.

page 236 note 2 The Medium is the Massage (New York, Bantam Books), p. 53Google Scholar.

page 238 note 1 Giles Goat-Boy (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books), p. 315Google Scholar.

page 238 note 2 This article is a slightly revised version of a paper read at the meeting of the European Association for American Studies held in Rome in September 1967.