Les Poésies de Clotilde de Surville: superchérie littéraire et subversion des genres

The publication of Clotilde de Surville's Poésies, in 1803, is one of the most famous literary hoaxes of the nineteenth century. Among those involved were Charles de Vanderbourg, who wrote a lengthy preface in which he attempted to recreate a female poetic tradition, Charles Nodier, Sainte-Beuve and a number of "littérateurs.The poems, supposedly written in the fifteenth century, were finally attributed to the late eighteenth century marquis de Surville. The fact that, in the body of works debating over the authenticity of the poems, patent anachronisms are overlooked while the feminine themes of the poems are used as evidence of the sexual identity of the poet, raise the questions of gendered writing and of the rule of ideology over plausibility in this seventy-year long hoax. (In French) (RS)