In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Creoles Auguste-Jean de Traversay, Jules Levilloux, and Louis de Maynard de Queilhe depicted French Caribbean women as national and cultural allegories: spaces of conflict that either denounce the metropole's contempt for Creole society or deplore this society's shortcomings and decay. Theses writers’ failed national romances stress the necessity to reimagine the French nation and the role of the Creole community within it. Their novels expose concerns pertaining to French nationalism. In the wake of political unrest, in presenting dysfunctional families and dangerous liaisons, their novels bare the cracks in French national unity and show a patriotic desire to be recognized as French citizens. Written before the rise of twentieth-century nationalism in the Americas and its anticolonialism, their projects delineate principles that Jean Franco examines in a more contemporary context. Their ideology is similar to ‘a nationalist discourse as an enactment of contradictions—the struggle to tell historical truth when that “truth” is always written from a partisan point of view, the struggle to maintain purity of boundaries when that purity means the exclusion of the heterogenous.’

Traversay's, Levilloux's, and Maynard's works foreground the connections between national formation and the novel, but also function as historical writings in order to denounce errors of the past. These novelists’ projects encompass ‘a cultural history in which essay, chronicle, and historical document have been grafted onto novels, a history of rereadings.’ By rewriting earlier colonial representations of femininity that crystallize a vanishing political body, these writers are in dialogue with one another and authors from continental France such as Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. They also influence Creole historians such as Sidney Daney de Marcillac or Etienne Rufz de Lavison. Their conflicting intertexts regarding the past express concern for the future of the (white) Creole nation within France.

What happens when foreign writers reread and rewrite a colonial literary heritage without understanding its ramifications? At the turn of the century, Lafcadio Hearn and Jenny Manet, writers who traveled to the French Antilles, illustrated the mechanisms of this intertexuality in a transatlantic and local context.