French Prose Of The First Half Of The 19th Century And The Problem Of Personal Writing

This article examines autobiographical texts (personal novels, memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, letters) by French writers of the first half of the 19th century as a unified whole, demonstrating their homogeneity and revealing the process of the novelization of genres within so-called «documentary prose. » It is important to consider that «fictionality, » as a feature of personal writing in Romanticism, does not necessarily imply falsehood or the author's deliberate fabrication of the self-according to literary conventions in order to conceal their true identity by replacing it with fictional «doubles. » Therefore, it is crucial to take into account the authorial intention, which is largely shaped by how Romantic culture of the 19th century conceived of the self. It is essential to avoid the danger of reducing literature to a mere game in which the individuality of the writer is lost. One must fully attribute to the realm of writing what constitutes the very essence of personal self-awareness, equating the writing «I» with the act of writing itself.