Poetique des cycles romanesques de Balzac a Volodine in Bloomington, MN

Why do writers link their novels together in cycles? What processes do they employ to do this? Is our reading of a novel transformed if it is inserted into a cycle? This work proposes a general poetics of the cycle, from Balzac to Volodine, via Dumas, Zola, Giono, and Asimov.