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Abstract:

The "Albums de la Pléiade" are a French series of books related to the prestigious "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade", published by Gallimard since 1932. In the French literary landscape, the "Pléiade" is known to be a patrimonial series, gathering several hundred volumes of canonical literature from many historical periods all around the world. Its success was guaranteed from the start not only by its high-brow corpus and well-documented scientific apparatus, but also by its practical aspect due to the small format of these books (identical for every volume), as well as a beautiful packaging in leather covers. The Albums de la Pléiade, on the other hand, are a series born in 1962 to promote the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Published to this day, these books display an identical appearance to the main series (small format, leather cover, gilded spine), but instead of containing canonical literature, they offer rich iconographic collections relating to writers previously published in the Pléiade, accompanied by short biographies. The Albums are given by booksellers as a gift for the purchase of three volumes from the Bibliothèque series during a specific two-week event occurring every year in bookstores in the francophone world, the Quinzaine de la Pléiade. The Albums are printed in limited numbers and cannot officially be sold separately, though they circulate for a rather high price in the second-hand sector. Their rarity makes those books sought-after collection items. The aim of this analysis is to observe the generic makeup of the Albums de la Pléiade, which oscillates between biography and portrait, both of these genres being conciliated by a mediatic structure that borrows from the family album and the museum, in order to establish what kind of image of authors and literature is projected by the series and its specific means of representation. Indeed, while the Albums' authors claim to portray writers in a "never before seen" light by displaying the intimate side of their private lives, the global authors' image construed by these books actually shows them as "geniuses" whose lives are inseparable from their literary creation. This authors' image, complemented by a display of "relics" from the writers' lives, contributes to the fetishization of the authors' figures and their subsequent inscription within the literary canon by means of this museal display. Finally, this study will examine the way those authors' images are being used as an advertising quality, seeing that the main function of these books is to promote the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade". Since the relationship between culture and advertising has always been strained, the Albums deploy several techniques aiming to conceal their promotional purpose, most notably by adopting the generic makeup of biographies and portraits in order to integrate the field of literary criticism, but also through their distribution modes, which create an aura of exclusivity around the series. Throughout this analysis, we hope to show how literary heritage is constructed in the francophone world by means of practices that seem rather unusual within the literary field.