Revue française d'études américaines, vol. XXXIII, juillet 1987, p. 391--403.

Anne Foata

Les États-Unis dans l'oeuvre d'Andrew Lytle. La vision historique

Abstract. Andrew Lytle's work belongs to the category defined by Richard Gray as the "literature of memory," which means that it is directly inspired by the American past and that it is nurtured by his vision of American history. For Lytle, the history of his country is a sequence of waste and depradation, an apprenticeship in unbridled power and pride, which eventually destroyed the spiritual values of Christendom. Lytle's allegiance to the Christian dogma, however, so often proclaimed in his critical and polemical essays, gives way in his novels to an enlarged mythic vision that makes of the settlement of the New World a re-enactment of the Edenic Fall and of the linear apprehension of Time in the Christian soteriology a mere fragment of the eternal present of myth.

Anne.Foata2@vnumail.com