La Collection des Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques (1787-1789) : enjeux éditoriaux, génériques et idéologiques dans l’Europe des Lumières

The main focus of the thesis research is the collection of Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques published by the publisher Charles-Georges-Thomas Garnier (1787-1789). It contains thirty-six volumes of French fiction from the late 17th and the 18th centuries, as well as a few translations, mainly from English. The collection includes novels such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Voltaire's Micromégas, Cyrano de Bergerac's L'Autre Monde and Lucien de Samosate's A True Story, as well as works by lesser-known authors such as the Chevalier de Mouhy and Mme de Roumier-Robert. Each volume also contains two previously unpublished illustrations by the artist Clément-Pierre Marillier.Garnier's collection is an excellent point of reference for understanding what unites these fictions and what characterises them. Although modern critics tend to assign them to the genres of utopia, science fiction or the French concept of fantastique, this study seeks to understand the rich generic categorisation specific to this period and to situate it in relation to these more modern concepts. The thesis thus proposes a critical path structured around an exploration of the paratext in order to shed light on the foundations of Garnier's publishing project. The analysis focuses firstly on the way in which the paratextual apparatus guides the reception of the works and constructs an overall coherence: the collection is presented to potential readers by advertising leaflets, and contains warnings at the beginning of each volume. These discourses by the publisher highlight the theoretical issues underlying the definition and categorisation of the literary genres in the collection.This initial look is gradually broadened in the second part to study the effect of the collection by highlighting the networks of meanings constructed by the layout of the collection and the paratextual discourses. This process has enabled us to gain a better grasp of the characteristics of these generic categories by situating them not only on the implicit fictional cartography of the collection, but also by reintegrating them into a well-marked encyclopaedic path, dotted with illustrations, and dedicated to the exploration of the imaginary and to philosophical edification. This dynamic is explored in greater depth in the third section, which looks at the literary genre from two angles: the relationship to travel, through a rhetoric of verisimilitude that pastiche authentic narratives, and the relationship to the imagination, by examining their roots in the fantasy, the speculation and the fantastique.Finally, three key assertions emerge from the paratextual apparatus and are confirmed in the course of the study. Firstly, imaginary voyages and related genres have a strong propensity for intertextuality and hypertextuality in Gérard Genette's sense. Secondly, these fictions fall into the category of novels known at the time as works of the imagination, alongside fairy tales and oriental tales. Thirdly, they were designed to have an educational impact on the reader, thereby participating in a project of critical edification.