Aux sources du sensationnel : Wilkie Collins lecteur de l’abbé Prévost ?

Abstract

This study offers a new hypothesis about the fact upon which Wilkie Collins's Basil is supposed to be founded and reads this first sensational novel not as an alleged biography but as a meticulous rewriting of an 18th-century newspaper anecdote: du desespere, published by Prevost in his journal Le Pour et contre. It analyses the author's particular strategy in amplifying this true story and tries to explain the more general pertinence of Prevost's work as a journalist and a documentary novelist for the formation of Wilkie Collins's poetics of fiction. A relation is thus established between Basil and Prevost's Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, the relevance of which, more than a century after its publication, can be explained by the current success of another and most recent rewriting of Manon Lescaut: Dumas fils's La Dame aux camelias...