Short Description

The Reconstruire Delille project aims to bring the poet Jacques Delille back into the spotlight. Praised from the 1770s to the end of the Napoleonic era, before being transformed into a counter-model by Romanticism, he played a considerable and now underestimated role in the French and European culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. On the one hand, this project produces the first scientific edition of his poems and a selection of other works based on an approach that conforms to philological criteria. On the other hand, it combines this work with a reconstruction of Delille’s reception, from his first works to the 1900s, with two objectives:

• To show that Delille’s poetry is integrated into forms of dialogue with its receivers, both in its emergence and in its material presentation.

• To try to understand the dynamics of his canonization and ultimate rejection.

By using the usual tools of literary studies and the approaches of network analysis, the vectors of diffusion of his texts are studied, the use and stakes of his revivals are analyzed, and an account of the praise or criticism that accompany them is provided, all of which enrich the critical edition. The collection of numerous traces of echoes of Delille – made possible by the existence of vast online corpora accessible by automated searches – enables the proposal of a mass model of this diffusion that refines its periodization and disciplinary variations, and a new approach to the study of Delille to the scientific community.

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