DescriptionThrough adventure, literature's topos par excellence, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Schwob, Pierre Mac Orlan and Blaise Cendrars demonstrate the urgency, in an age of rationalism and historical positivism, of restoring imagination as a cognitive tool with fundamental social and political functions in the construction of any human community. As an apologist of the romance, Stevenson excavates the common ground between novel and romance, between history and literature, namely the art of narrative. For Stevenson, narrative constitutes the point of view from which to consider the representation of reality. While the novel and history tend to approach reality as content, the romance points to its principle of creation. The shift in point of view from reality to representation and from content to principle allows a new conception of subjectivity and another relation to knowledge to emerge. Following Stevenson, French authors writing in the context of World War I and its aftermath take up epistemological and ontological questions pertaining to the imagination and extend them beyond literary debate, to society at large.