In this article, we will conduct a detailed review on the topic of hairiness in the prehistoric area during the late 19th century. We will endeavour to understand its way of self‐representation, or lack thereof, as a space where poetic, scientific and ontological matters are at stake. This will allow us to develop an epistemocritical point of view concerning this imagery, built both on scientific and popular productions. Based on a repertory of pictural and textual representations, originating from both pop culture as well as erudite and elitist sources, but also caricatures and teratological exhibitions referring more or less expressly to prehistoric times, we will study the potential concepts of humanity grasped by this issue, and we will analyze the poetical, aesthetical but also ideological and philosophical challenges raised in the process.

This paper discusses a man’s obsession with the memories of his dead wife as represented in Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges‐la‐Morte. More precisely, Rodenbach draws a haunting picture of the woman’s hair, which is personified and acquires the dimension of a full‐fledged character in the novel. The Belgian author places Hugues Viane dead wife’s hair at the center of his particular vision of fictional space, vacillating between tangible and intangible (Boraczek 1999) as well as between sacred and demoniac. The woman’s gold braid is preserved in a glass case: by worshipping it, the widower makes a religion of his sorrow. Furthermore, the woman’s hair generates a dense web of analogies between Bruges, in which Bachelard (1942) sees the Ophelization of an entire city, Viane’s dead wife compared in the novel to a Virgin, and the actress Jane Scott, a femme fatale who seems to have the same blond hair as the dead woman. By doing so, Rodenbach places the woman’s figure at the crossroads between literature and visual arts.

Novelist, storyteller, philosopher by training, Michel Tournier tackles in his novel The Golden droplet, published in 1985, the problem of racism towards people with different physique. Through the axial intrigue of the novel, that of Idriss, and especially those annexed to Barberousse and The Blond Queen, the author presents the stereotypes that confront otherness, the unlike (negro, redhead, blond, etc…) and calls for respect for physical differences and acceptance of the different Other. It is a whole philosophy of the representation of the other that he develops in his novel and that we propose to analyze in this study.

An emblem of heterology, hair causes horripilation and fascination: it is a part of the shapelessness that signals a rejection of rationality and philosophy, of metaphorisation and aesthetics, favouring instead ugliness, abjectness and material baseness. It verges on an unheimlich (uncanny) zone, which borders on the unrepresentable. Thus, this irreducible object unleashes the transgressive power of the sacred, that, no doubt, of eroticism, but even more so, that of the Dionysiac, which is the will for power and an increase in the feeling of being alive, against ascetic, hygienist or fascist ideals. Hair would be the fetish, attesting to the perverse structure of the forbidden and of civilization.

The subject of the article is the French reception of Tannhäuser after the failure of the three première performances in March 1861. From 1862 to 1894 the Parisian audience had to content itself with shorter or longer selections of this opera executed during Sunday concerts of Jules Pasdeloup’s, Edouard Colonne’s and Charles Lamoureux orchestras. In 1891 some French and foreign journalists, encouraged by the first Tannhäuser’s representations in Bayreuth, the Temple of Wagnerian art, began the discussions on the value of this work, some of them trying to prove that it’s a  m u s i c a l   d r a m a  as good as his later achievements, some other, on the contrary, pretending that Tannhäuser is an opera, marvelous, outstanding, extraordinary, but only an  o p e r a.