Roman d'aventure (s)
1. Medieval
Term sometimes used to refer to medieval romances such as Le Roman de la Violette or Joufroi de Poitiers, which are characteristically 13th-c. or later, with a strong narrative line, relatively slight engagement with courtliness or fin'amor, and little conspicuous use of magic or the marvellous. It distinguishes such works (though not with any rigour) from ‘Arthurian’ or ‘courtly’ romances, such as those of Chrétien de Troyes.
2. Modern
The 18th-c. sources of this genre are twofold: the picaresque novel and children's literature— Perrault's Contes (1697) and Madame d'Aulnoy's Contes nouveaux (1698) released a current of fantasy and initiatory writing in which heroism, denied to the guileful picaro, was available to uncorrupted youth, facing the world alone. This latter trend was important for the 19th and 20th c. in two senses: many writers drew on the spirit of the fairy-tale (Nodier, Sand, Daudet, Alain-Fournier); and much ‘adult’ literature was adopted by, and increasingly geared to, a youthful readership. What had already happened to Swift and Defoe happened, in the course of the 19th c., to Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper (see Gustave Aimard, Les Trappeurs de l'Arkansas, 1858; La Loi de lynch, 1859), Hugo, Dumas, and Loti. Robinson Crusoe had his own particular progeny—Verne's L'Île mystérieuse and L'École des Robinsons (1882); Louis Boussenard's Les Robinsons de la Guyane (1882); Tournier's Vendredi, ou les Limbes du Pacifique and its children's version, Vendredi ou la Vie sauvage (1971)—but the picaresque had bequeathed a whole legacy of travel adventures: Verne's Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873); Boussenard's Le Tour du monde d'un gamin de Paris (1880); G. Bruno's Le Tour de la France par deux enfants.
The 19th c. also saw the development of the third constitutive element of the genre, the roman populaire, or, in its earlier form, the roman-feuilleton. The launching of the cheap press by Émile de Girardin in 1836 (La Presse) brought the novels of Sue and Dumas to the public in gripping episodes; and later Ponson du Terrail's Rocambole (1859), the work of Gaboriau, and Xavier de Montépin's La Porteuse de pain (1884). As the century progressed, the inflated Romantic hero, the justice-seeker and self-redeemer of earlier feuilletons, was ousted from a sanctimonious world of pettier crimes and greater melodrama. Serials fell back on formula writing and a conformist ideology. But something of the original antisocial stance of the popular novel was recovered in Gaston Leroux's Chéri-Bibi and Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin. The roman d'aventures had become enmeshed in the emergence of the roman policier [see Detective Fiction] and the roman noir. According to
[Clive Scott]
Bibliography
- J.-Y. Tadié, Le Roman d'aventures (1982)
