Château et littérature

From the Middle Ages to the present day, the castle has provided a favourable setting to literary production, a place of refuge, a suitable environment that allows the writer - voluntarily secluded or not – to find security, the solitude necessary for the completion of his or her work and also sometimes sources of inspiration and material resources. It is at the same time a space in which orally transmitted literary forms have flourished, and château literature is characterized by a production of works of striking diversity.

But the castle is also the setting and even the driving force of literary fiction, from Arthurian legend to comic books and heroic fantasy novels, not to mention children’s literature. A wide variety of texts – from the most frivolous to the most terrifying - feature real castles, inspired by reality or totally imagined by the author. They modify the perception and representation of castles transforming them into metaphor. A place of refuge in Boccaccio, a symbol of an idealised past for the Romantics, a dramatic setting for endless reversals in popular literature or a haunted place for the Gothic novel, the castle is transformed through the prism of the text. Historical novels introduce children to châtelain societies, while the fantastic genre makes use of a castral framework to lead readers to the realm of the strange.