Hybridity, hierarchy, and couleur rabelaisienne: the afterlives of François Rabelais on the late nineteenth-century Parisian lyric stage (1855-1895)

Abstract

This thesis examines the late nineteenth-century lyric afterlife of the sixteenth-century writer François Rabelais by examining the four musico-theatrical ‘adaptations’ of his works that appeared on the lyric stages of Paris between 1855 and 1895. These are: Théodore Labarre and Henri Trianon’s Pantagruel (1855); Hervé, Clairville, and Octave Gastineau’s Panurge (1879); Louis Ganne, Oscar Méténier, and Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest’s Rabelais (1892); and Robert Planquette, Henri Meilhac, and Albert de Saint-Albin’s Panurge (1895).

On the basis of this material, the thesis addresses wider questions about the nature of the reception and reproduction of cultural artefacts. It interrogates the relationship between Rabelais’s texts and biography, their late nineteenth-century lyric afterlives, the period’s lyric culture (particularly its genre hierarchies), and ideas about the writer’s life and works that were in currency during that time. As well as using Rabelais’s reception in the nineteenth century as a tool with which to unravel some of the panoply of potential interpretations of his texts, this thesis demonstrates that in nineteenth-century imaginaries both Rabelais’s life and works were considered stylistic, registral, and social hybrids. This heterogeneity is the basis for what I term couleur rabelaisienne: in other words, a mode of historical representation that intersects literary and historical aesthetic discourses closely associated with Rabelais’s works and biography, particularly their supposed stylistic and social hybridity.

Alongside its study of Rabelais’s lyric posterity, this thesis makes a case for an approach to the phenomenon we now call ‘adaptation’ that remains sensitive to details of its theorisation through history. By offering more flexible frameworks through which to deconstruct, reshape, and subvert the hierarchies implied in terms like ‘source’ and ‘adaptation’, I seek to open new avenues for understanding the myriads of ways in which cultural artefacts interrelate.