We are saddened by the news  that  Professor Charles Grivel has passed away. He was a mentor to many scholars working on Literature and Media studies, and was a tutelary figure in our international association devoted to the study of  Popular and Media cultures, the LPCM,

He will also be  remembered as an outstanding and inspirational researcher, who pioneered studies of marginalised cultural forms, and who promoted innovative and firmly theoretically grounded approaches.  His important dissertation, Production de l’intérêt romanesque. Un état du texte (1870-1880, un essai de constitution de sa théorie), La Haye-Paris, Mouton, 1973,  was republished online in 2010, as a special issue of the Journal Belphégor (9.2: 2010). This was a  structural study of  200 novels, which were representative of the 3239  published in Paris between 1870 and 1880.  It offered a new taxonomy of novel types, one based not upon  literary merit, but  one focused on the distinction between various levels of consumption. The application of a materialist approach to a big corpus of novels laid the foundation for much of our own work using Big Data technologies. Our  AHRC project,  Visualising European Crime Fiction, which formed part of the Digital transformations in the Humanities framework call, is indebted to Grivel’s work and influence. His texts survive and will continue to inspire  students and academics in Europe and elsewhere.

Production de l’intérêt romanesque and its companion volume can be downloaded freely from Belphégor: Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique. 9.2 (2010) :

http://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/47786/09_02_Grivel_prod_cont.pdf?sequence=1

A list of Charles Grivel’s publications is available on the webpage of the University Mannheim :

Click to access grivel_publikationen.pdf

For a  list of (hit and miss) links to Web pages referring to works by Charles Grivel see : Grivel on the web http://egrivel.tripod.com/link1.html