Under Ideal Conditions: Provincializing the ‘French’ Poetic Canon with Amélie Gex (1835–1883)

Taking inspiration from ‘regendering’ initiatives, the question underpinning my project has been: how can we go back to the drawing board and effectively (re)provincialize the nineteenth-century poetic canon, one influenced by Paris-based cénacles? Methodologically, I explore the very possibility of bypassing Paris, at least on a theoretical level, in order to be able to analyse nineteenth-century poetry from the provinces comparatively, without the capital’s centralizing force at play. A similar theoretical experiment could be undertaken, for instance, if we wanted to analyse female writers by eliminating the voice of their male contemporaries, which are usually used as a yardstick of value, whereby this or that female poet is worthy of reading because praised by her male contemporaries. In so doing, spaces and voices once considered liminal can surface, instead, as the hubs of wider zigzagging networks of poetic exchange. This articles explores the example of Amélie Gex (1835–1883), known by her male pseudonym Dian de la Jeânna, the poète patoisante known as ‘la Muse de Chambéry’.