Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Krahn, Whitney

Titel

Novel Architecture The Fictional Writings of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Architecture has long interested writers of literature’s conventional genres—novelists, poets, playwrights—as well as literary theorists. Scholarship abounds on these intersections. How literature interested architects is a less common scholarly inquiry, but it is no less valid. In fact, as literary studies are increasingly called into question in current times, it seems pertinent to follow any leads where literature’s wider relevance might help defend it from skeptics. In my dissertation, I examine the influence of literature on architecture by way of the architect Viollet-le-Duc and the five novels he wrote in the 1870s. Although in the first half of the century Victor Hugo predicted that the book would kill the building (“Ceci tuera cela”), I argue that literature actually inspired Viollet-le-Duc: first, the model of the literary field encouraged him to revive his own art and furnished the example; then, works of literature provided the vehicle by which he could restore meaning to the buildings and to the profession by writing them. Finally, by stepping into the figure of the writer, Viollet-le-Duc was able to realize ambitions that went beyond the powers held by the figure of the architect: like Hugo, he found an outlet that allowed him to comment on the past and attempt to shape the future of the French Republic.