De ‘la littérature du Midi de l’Europe’ a l’avènement d’un « nouveau monde » littéraire: l’œuvre de Simonde de Sismondi et Ferdinant Denis revisitée”1

Abstract

The departure of the Portuguese royal family and the court to Brazil as a consequence of Napoleon’s project for Europe has caught the attention of scholars to a new world, and its capacity of producing important changes in the cultural and literary relations between European countries and colonised ones. The Brazilian case, particularly present in the work of two of the first foreign historians of Portuguese literature, Simonde de Sismondi and Ferdinand Denis, provides an interesting field of research in this sense. Our analysis will focus on the publication of the book De la litterature du Midi de l’Europe, in 1813, by the first, and on the Resume de l’histoire litteraire du Portugal suivi du Resume de l’histoire du Bresil, by the latter, in 1826. Keywords: Simonde de Sismondi, Ferdinand Denis, Madame de Stael, Literatures of the South of Europe.