Despite their unflagging worldwide popularity, their perennial availability, and their innumerable cinematographic adaptations, the works of Alexandre Dumas père have been largely unappreciated by critics. There has been, for some time now, a specialized journal devoted to Dumas studies, and articles on Dumas have regularly appeared in other scholarly publications. Still, a rapid comparison between the immense bibliography generated by the writings of Charles Baudelaire--whose total literary output, when measured in quantitative terms, is utterly dwarfed by that of Dumas--and the paucity of critical literature devoted to Dumas's writings affords a reasonably accurate means to gauge the place Dumas occupies in today's literary pantheon. Equally telling is the fact that Dumas's novels and plays receive scant attention in the standard histories of nineteenth-century French literature and are rarely found on lists of required reading at French or American universities. There appear to be several reasons for this gap between Dumas's mass appeal and his lack of scholarly or institutional status.
