Une pierre à l’édifice ? La littérature mise au service des patrimoines

As the bearer of values and imaginary worlds, literature can be both a heritage and a heritage tool, thanks to its ability to confer legitimacy on certain objects or discourses. In general, it is the symbolic capital of works, rather than their critical function, that underpins the selection, conservation, mediation and transmission operations that contribute to this heritage-building process. But how are we to understand the transfer of values that underpins these exchanges, when literature is mobilized to defend objects that are already part of a heritage that has been or is being built up? Beyond the dynamics of legitimization, this issue aims to explore the economic, emotional, communicational and even political implications of the mobilization of literature by other heritage objects such as museums, monuments and landscapes. Its aim is to highlight the articulation or continuum of relations of exposure, valorization and recovery between literature and heritage, and to ask whether it is possible to identify any structural characteristics.