The fall of the nineteenth century resurrects one of the most ancient and powerful myth in human imaginary: the end of the world. Politi cal and military struggles, social and cultural metamorphoses, technical and scienti fi c progress disrupt common representati ons, melti ng enthusiasm and anxiety. Arti sts echo this apocalypti c feeling. Rimbaud is one of them : from his fi rst poems to Illuminati ons, the end of the world feed his work linking collecti ve and private anguishes.

This arti cle aims at analysing the imaginary cycles and the regenerati on of the Great Mythical Time in chosen works of Jules Verne (The Mysterious Island, The Eternal Adam). The analysis leads to a conclusion that in both these works the given theme plays an important role, whereas the appearance of the great cosmic cycles ending with spectacular catastrophes results in a readjustment of the images of the beginnings of the human civilisati ons (images of paradise, Atlanti s, etc.). According to Verne, the end of one civilisati on, or even our world, not only is an image of an irreversible apocalypti c disaster but also the beginning of a new civilisati on.

Barbey d’Aurevilly didn’t like his century, judging it as a distress ti me. This period personifi es for him all possible vices, opposed to the happy ti me before the Revoluti on and the XVIIIth century. His novels express his enormous nostalgia for the past. This nostalgia is visible on all the levels of his literary technique, as character constructi on, confi gurati ons of ti me and space, the plot. All these elements are inevitably leading to the conclusion that everything is over, history is irrevocable, future is hopeless and the Christ hasn’t come yet on the Earth to give us the chance of the resurrecti on.

We noti ce an impact, an infl uence of the French History on the literature. For example, we fi nd the theme of the death in novels due to the modern wars: the World War I and the World War II. Indeed, the narrati ve's creati on respects the transformati on of the society. We can ask the questi on whether the literature doesn’t want to put into the narrati ve's form its own death. To illustrate our argumentati on, we chose testi monies of Holocaust and absurd theater plays. This corpus is representati ve of the depression and the pessimism of France afer the war. In reality, an apocalypti c narrati ve, a dramati c art of the end, is the mirror of a society, and a constantly evolving literature, which was born, dies and will be reborn.

Literature rooted in myth, the prose of the two writers is structured around the downfall-redempti on axis. In their view, the adamic fall means living in Time. Approached from the angle of primordial authenti city, existi ng in ti me is practi cally an ontological non-enti ty, which means that historical existence is devoid of the authenti c, profound and plenary dimension of the paradisiacal beginnings of humanity, any sacred reference being eliminated. Oblivion, amnesia, slumber, rootlessness are parameters of this desacralised world that is nevertheless off ered a chance of redempti on through the initi ati c regaining of adamic memory.

Our arti cle focuses on the apocalypse as the structure principle of novel saga Chronicles of Plateau-Mont-Royal. Tremblay, Québec author and playwrighter, creates an extense formati on, predesti nated to destructi on, because of prohibited, incest love which prefi gures an indispensable punishment and tragical end of one family, one world. The most tragical end comes in the case of Marcel, who balances between two worlds – imaginati ve and real – whose mutual tension he tries to overcome creati ng an alternati ve reality. But fi nally only reveals the empti ness of both spheres and the impossibillity of any salvati on. The purpose of our text consists not only in reconstructi on of the apocalypse as the philosophy-theological concept of the ontological negati on, but also in another meanings, which are rated by mythological recourse an religious mythemes raising the tragic end of Tremblay´s novel universe.

On the threshold of Malevil is the Event. But on the threshold only. Then the narrati ve focuses on post-events. We will stop on the threshold. Indeed, how to start a work which deals with the end of a ti me, when the end is just a beginning? Malevil opens with a closure and this "opening" contains the seeds of a break, the fi rst symptom of which is linguisti c : to put into words the unspeakable horror, to grasp it, and thus name it. The second symptom is temporal : the linearity is broken and that which held things together, the binding agent, has been shatt ered. Some measure of order must be reestablished from that chaos, the Event must become an Advent. The third symptom is a generic one : the narrati ve is told through the fi cti onal form of a diary, a testi mony, which turns writi ng into a unifying act.

The paper proposes an interpretati on of Michel Houellebecq’s work in the perspecti ve of heroism and victi mizati on, two fundamental, according to J.-M. Apostolidès, categories of the western civilizati on. Referring those categories to Houellebecq’s discussion with contemporary individualism and its crisis, announced by the French intellectualists and called penseurs’68 by L. Ferry and A. Renaut, the author of the paper shows the presence of post-heroic utopias which are manifestati ons of humanism reduced to individual and trivial happiness in Houellebecq’s work. In this context, Houellebecq’s work appears to be a form of resistance against the fall of the great heroic traditi on. Heroism and victi mizati on enable to associate Houellebecq’s work with the
predicament of the retour du sujet (return of the subject) through an ethic of the sacrifi ce as well as a game with Roland Barthes’ concept of the death of the author.

Le fi ls de la femme-mâle and La bible et le fusil of Maurice Bandaman, an Ivoirian novelist evoke two diegeti c universes, the State of N’Kplimiti and the Republic of Ikse. These countries are respecti vely governed by Aganimo and Le Plus-que-patriarche, two piti less potentates. Many sociohistorical indices show that the two degenerated societi es painted in the novels are the caricature of the Côte d'Ivoire under Houphouët-Boigny’s authority at the end of the Twenti eth century. In these novels, the intrigues based on the features of the eschatological scenario of the Bible reveal, not only the author’s aversion for that dictatorial regime, his thirst for social justi ce, but also his faith in the future advent of a right and happy world.

Born in Paris in 1961, Michel Pagel is a French science fi cti on and fantasy writer. L’Équilibre des paradoxes, novel published in 1999, is classed as an example of steampunk, current fl owing directly from science fi cti on. The steampunk texts mix two diff erent periods: the past, specifi cally the nineteenth or early twenti eth century, and the future. This world, which oscillates between the past and the future, also mix the real with the imaginary. The authors take advantage of realism to describe in detail the reality, but this reality is certainly changed and distorted by diff erent means. In L’Équilibre des paradoxes, Pagel creates a highly distorted world. In this novel, we fi nd four types of reality deformati on: the deformati on of ti me, space, characters and narrati ve deformati on.