Cet ouvrage entend rendre hommage à Pierre-Louis Rey, au professeur, au chercheur et à l'écrivain (Pierre-Louis Rey a publié plusieurs romans). On y trouvera un portrait croisé de l'universitaire et du romancier, suivi de vingt-deux contributions, écrites par ses collègues et amis, sur les auteurs dont il a exploré « l'univers romanesque »: Gobineau, Stendhal,Flaubert, Proust, Camus, Balzac, Sand, Gautier, Zola et Simon.
Comparing the novel to «a mirror taken for a walk along a path», Stendhal delivered the most poetic and probably the deepest definition of a genre that, in the early 21st century, remains problematic. Throughout his career, Pierre-Louis Rey never ceased to study this multifaceted magic mirror of the novel by teaching literature at the New Sorbonne University and writing critical essays on 19th and 20th century’s greatest novelists, publishing some of their works. This book pays a tribute to the professor, the researcher and the writer (Pierre-Louis Rey published several novels). One will there find a crossed portrait of the academic researcher and of the novelist. Will follow twenty-two contributions written by his colleagues and friends on the authors whose “fictional world” he explored: Gobineau, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Camus, Balzac, Sand, Gautier, Zola and Simon.