Le Nouveau monde. L’Abbé Pellegrin auteur à la Comédie-Française

This contribution aims to analyse the production context of Le Nouveau monde, a “pièce à Intermèdes” composed by Abbé Pellegrin, poet, librettist and playwright, performed at the theatre of Comédie-Française in 1722. The belongs in a sort of “minor” or secondary repertoire (petites pièces en un acte, prologues dramatiques, divertissements, pièces d’agrément), as opposed to the "ordinary" or classical repertoire (Racine, Molière, Corneille, mainly). Actors in Comédie- Française often represented this minor genre that satisfied the public’s tastes to respond to an ever-increasing demand for "novelty". The work does not belong to a specific genre, it is a hybrid of different dramaturgies and tonalities. Spanning from comic to elegiac, from the occasional heroic-comic pastoral influences to the opera and musical theatre, the intertextuality occupies a fundamental place in this interesting form of hybrid literature. By rejecting the codes of traditional genres, Le nouveau monde reveals authorial postures implying an aesthetic of variety, polyphony and hybridization of forms and genres. The analysis of the play allows us to investigate the evolution of genres during the first half of the 18th century, seen as a result of contamination between genres and competition between theatres. This evolution finally shows how minor and somewhat illegitimate genres manage to penetrate the official circuit, transgressing the codes or at least crossing the boundaries between repertoires, genres and theatres.