Diffrazioni del nome d’autore nell’opera di Charles Sorel

Charles Sorel is the greatest French writer of the Baroque period but, despite the breadth of his production and the notoriety of his character, his name often escapes indications in the paratexts of his works. In fact, Sorel often hides behind anonymity or resorts to a varied typology of authorial nomination consisting of pseudonyms, heteronyms, namesakes, acronyms.
The procedure that the writer pursues to distance himself from any declaration of authorship of his texts creates a rift between the claim of authorial authority and the attempt to erase his identity. The process of dissimulating the author's name tends to a self-censorship of the paternity of the work and induces the novelist to invent authorial substitutes. We were interested in the cases of onomastic reticence that Sorel put into practice in his two best-known novels: L'Histoire comique de Francion (1623, 1626 and 1633) and Le Berger extravagant (1626-1627 and 1633-1634), which shows a complex vicious circle of self-reference and a sought-after rhetoric of authorial identity.