Bucolic Singing in the pastoral Novel (or the Avatars of a dissonant Topic)
The article aims to analyze the ontological diffusion of bucolic songs in pastoral novels, taking in consideration the historical and aesthetic evolution of their writing. It demonstrates that shepherds’ songs, as original emblems of the Bergeries, evolve into various topical formulations of sound, within the framework of the complex evolution of pastoral romance in France, in the 16th and especially in the 17th century. Based on a fairly broad corpus (Sannazar, the first French Bergeries, Diana de Montemayor and its French translations, L'Astrée and its sequels), it highlights the formal vicissitudes and the dissonances suffered by pastoral song, in the temporal dynamic which marks these aesthetically hybrid Arcadian texts.