Alexandre Dumas mythographe et mythologue

Like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas is a writer whose part of the work has been implanted durably in the collective imagination, revealing a carrier of modern mythologies. This book questions the survival of its two founding fictions: how are the cycle of the Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo revealing collective anxieties and aspirations, yesterday and today? Under what conditions and according to which modalities of fictions can they free themselves from their creator and their context to reach a form of timelessness? The first part of this book, "Alexandre Dumas mythographe", looks at the years during which Dumas emerged as the king of the French soap opera and managed to create modern mythologies. The second, "Alexandre Dumas mythologue", to an author who gradually finds that his hour of glory has passed and that some of his characters are intended to survive him. This awareness, accompanied by a real reflection on the power of myth, will be lived in a serene way. We must imagine Dumas as a happy mythographer.--Honoré Champion.