In its infancy, the novelistic genre was considered only as an object of entertainment without aesthetic value, which moreover was addressed to a female readership, and therefore below poetic and dramatic art (theatrical genre). Very little appreciated, only a few novels were born before the nineteenth century, and their authors fiercely assert that it was not their production:writers such as Abbé Prévost and Choderlos de Laclos ensure in their prefaces that they do not be at the origin of the novels they publish at a time when poetry dominates literature.
Thus begins its quest for legitimacy, in order to claim an interest that no one recognizes in it, the novel appropriates History and treats its events in a more romanticized way. The novel quickly turned to the realist current (which was born when the novel emancipated itself).
The novelist's objective was then to make the novel serious, and consequently to describe reality to which it is attached:clothing, food, enrichment, childbirth, these are the realities that the novel relates, and to which it wishes to have a certain legitimacy. The novelists then transformed popular mores into literary subjects:the characters of Les Misérables soon became as dignified as the Princess of Cleves. In addition, novelists testify to the reversibility of the status of Man, who is no longer dedicated to his condition. If he was once unable to rise to the rank of noble by being of the third estate, and vice versa, the French Revolution allowed the potential passage between the new social classes.
It was therefore its contemporary and realistic character that led to the dominance of the novel genre at the end of the nineteenth century.
At the end of the 19th century, the American West was the scene of many fortuitous discoveries of large deposits of fossils of dinosaurs! The public is passionate, the Museums compete to obtain always more specimens and in this unique context two men, two paleontologists, two old friends, will engag