Tout est symbolique pour Leon Bloy: l'histoire de l'humanite, sa propre vie, les contes sortis de son imagination offrent tous une image de Dieu sous des dehors inattendus. Il ne lui suffit pas de pourfendre le positivisme qui domine dans l'opinion de son epoque: a la religion de la Science il oppose une vision du monde dans laquelle le moindre evenement, reel ou imaginaire, exprime la Parole divine a l'instar de la Bible. Ainsi, toute realite est textuelle sous le regard de cet ecrivain qui, dans le divers de l'existence, apercoit, par fragments, la meme fiction transcendante. Cet ouvrage explore l'etonnante pratique de la litterature qui resulte de ce parti-pris apologetique risque. Le roman, l'historiographie, le pamphlet, le journal intime n'y sont jamais que des textes de seconde main: des reecritures deconcertantes qui, selon des conventions differentes, ont la Bible pour matrice et tentent d'en faire resonner les echos intempestifs a l'oreille des contemporains. Everything is symbolic for Leon Bloy: human history, his own life, the tales born of his imagination-all offer an image of God in unexpected guises. Not content to simply attack the positivism which dominated public opinion in his era, he countered the religion of Science with a world view in which the least significant event, whether real or imaginary, expressed the Divine Word in the same way as the Bible. Thus, all reality becomes textual from the perspective of this writer who, in contemplating the diversity of existence, perceived in it, fragment by fragment, the same transcendental fiction. This work explores the amazing literary manifestations of this bold apologetic bias. Here, novels, historiographies, pamphlets and diaries are little more than second-hand productions: disconcerting rewritings which, in accordance with disparate conventions, adopt the Bible as their matrix and strive to make its untimely echoes audible to a contemporary audience. Pierre Glaudes, a professor of French Literature at Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, has devoted most of his research to French 19th-century novelists and essayists: Joseph de Maistre, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Merimee, Bloy, Huysmans and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. He penned a work on the Esthetique de Barbey d'Aurevilly (2011). He also edited Les Diaboliques (1998) and Le Chevalier Des Touches (2007), and has just completed an anthology entitled Barbey d'Aurevilly journaliste. Currently, he is preparing a biography of Le Connetable des lettres.
