French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Voegele, Morales de la fiction, de La Fontaine à Sartre
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Augustin Voegele, Morales de la fiction - de La Fontaine à Sartre, Paris, Orizons, coll. "Comparaisons", 2016. ISBN 9791030900835.
Review published in Acta Fabula (October 2017, vol. 18, no. 8): Sophie Feller, "Reading as Action: The Pedagogical Virtues of Fiction".
Read an excerpt from the book on Fabula...
Not Why fiction?, nor What does fiction think?, nor even What does fiction do?, but rather: How does fiction do it? How does fiction manage to defend or illustrate a moral stance when it is defined by its independence from the so-called real world? Perhaps, moreover, it is only insofar as it is defictionalized that fiction can promote or proclaim a morality. Yet there are moralities that contain a constitutive element of fiction and that, in a sense, call upon fiction—such as Victor Hugo's intuitive morality, or Sartre's morality of freedom.
La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, Hugo, Tolstoy, Sartre: at first glance, the authors brought together here are not all obvious bedfellows. That is precisely why they are brought together. For neither fiction nor morality is immutable, and it is in their intermittences, fluctuations, and variations that their improbable union should be studied.
This study investigates how literature engages with ethical questions while maintaining its autonomy from the empirical world. Rather than asking what stories mean or why they exist, Augustin Voegele examines the mechanics of literary didacticism, questioning how imaginative writing can successfully advocate a moral stance. The volume bridges disparate literary traditions by juxtaposing classic moralists with nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures such as Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, and Jean-Paul Sartre, demonstrating that both literary forms and ethical systems are historically contingent rather than fixed.
By tracing the shifting boundaries between invention and instruction, the book offers valuable insights for scholars of comparative literature, intellectual history, and narrative theory. It serves as an engaging resource for readers interested in the philosophical dimensions of storytelling, the evolution of moral doctrine in literature, and the specific strategies authors use to guide readerly interpretation across various genres and centuries.