De la lecture à l’écriture : la bibliothèque politique de Jean Giono dans l’œuvre romanesque (1945-1970). Engagement ou désengagement ?

Within the scope of a recent scientific debate that calls into question the traditional separation between the novelist and the political thinker, our thesis provides a critical interpretation of some of Jean Giono’s late novels (1945-1970) with the aim of investigating the evolution of his literary engagement in this period. With the question of engagement at the center of our work, an overview of the debate on this notion and on the relationship between literature and politics in the Twentieth century is provided, along with an excursus on the authors attitude and on his production in the 1930s. As part of the author’s archive, Giono’s physical library is a source of extratextual information that has been taken into account for the interpretation of his late novels, particularly in regards to his sociopolitical views. The volumes containing his reading marks represent, in fact, an intertextual context for the novels, and the presence in the library of numerous political texts contrasts with the authorial image associated with a disengagement starting from the end of Second World War. Our study shows the presence of a form of literary engagement in Giono’s late production, even if the author abandons the explicit tone that characterized his pacifist production in the 1930s. As a tool to allow for further analysis, we provide a production pipeline for digital editions of Giono’s annotated books. We describe in detail all the stages, from the digitalization of the volumes, the creation of a handwritten text recognition (HTR) model for their transcription, to the assembling of the edition using the xml/TEI standard.