Panel: In the shadow of Maurice Edgar and Gaston — Forgotten mediators and literary canon(s) in the 20th century
As illustrated even recently by the French magazine America, the « special » relation between France and US literature is long-standing. In the World Republic of Letters (2004 for the English translation), Pascale Casanova developed the idea of Paris as a “Greenwich meridian” of world literature while emphasizing the importance of “[t]he great, often polyglot, cosmopolitan figures of the world of letters [who] act in effect as foreign exchange brokers, responsible for exporting from one territory to another texts whose literary value they determine by virtue of this very activity” (21).