Reappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

This book examines the phenomenon of the reappearance of characters in nineteenth-century French fiction. It approaches this from a hitherto unexplored perspective: that of the twin history of the aesthetic notion of originality and the legal notion of literary property. While the reappearance of characters in the works of canonical authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola is usually seen as a device which transforms the individual works of an author into a coherent whole, this book