On crossing the human-animal border through fiction: «Sylva» or the power to become a woman
Abstract
The French writer Vercors devotes several of his novels to the fictionalisation of the border between the human being and the animal, among them Sylva (1961). Theorised in his essay La sédition humaine (1949), this ontological border raises many questions, which the author attempts to answer through his literary creation. In Sylva, Vercors stages the metamorphosis of a fox into a woman. In this article, we will analyse the literary representation of this process and examine whether this change allows us to qualify or contradict Vercors’ thinking about the barrier between the two species.
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