Le traitement du nom dans Denier du rêve (1934): la culture onomastique italienne de Marguerite Yourcenar

In 1934, Denier du rêve by Marguerite Yourcenar, was one of the first French novels, if not the first, to turn the spotlight on the contemporary Italian Fascist regime. The book is set in Rome, in 1933, and is built around a small number of characters from different geographical, social and cultural backgrounds and this determines the choice of anthroponyms with notable forms from a diatopic, diastratic and even diachronic point of view. For other characters, however, a Cratylian (Roland Barthes, 1971) function of the name should be singled out, as the forms of the name are loaded with implicit semantic information. We would also like to dwell on some hypocoristic forms alien to the Italian onomastic heritage and ones which the author corrected in subsequent editions of the novel. The writer, in fact, takes one of the formal procedures used to create these kinds of names which requires the name to be shortened. However, while the method is well suited to certain types of formations, others prove insufficient to undergo this change and give rise to unconventional anthroponimic creations.