“La plus sainte des amantes et la plus amante des saintes”: Teresa d’Avila in Francia fra Ottocento e Novecento

Abstract

The article aims to study the importance of St. Teresa and her function as a character, between fiction and hagiography, in French literature between 19^th and 20^th century. Her presence answers to a not edifying model, but allows a description of the saint as an example of intelligence, of love and of virtue, a marginal literary model, but constant and present in all the literary genres. The Spanish saint shows itself as a very exploitable literary model and becomes in the second part of 20^th century and at the beginning of 21^st century an example of an engaged women able to swing between her religious vocation and the worldliness.