For the People, by the People?: Eugene Sue's "Les Mysteres De Paris" - A Hypothesis in the Sociology of Literature

Along with Alexandre Dumas "pere, Eugene Sue (1804-57) was the most successful popular French novelist of the first half of the nineteenth century. The present study engages with a problematic (emerging forms of popular literature), centered on a particular case (Sue's most famous novel, "Les Mysteres de Paris), and is underpinned by a specific hypothesis: the claim first advanced by the social historian Louis Chevalier that "Les Mysteres de Paris, through pressure of Sue's reader-correspondents as he wrote and published the novel in serial form, was a collective production ('written for the people by the people'). Prendergast opens lines of inquiry, identifies blockages, entertains speculations and poses questions to illuminate a range of larger issues in the sociology of literature and the history of the book.

Christopher Prendergast is Emeritus Professor of Modern French Literature at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of King's College and a Fellow of the British Academy.