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Lying in the sociology of culture, the sociology of novel does not know epistemological stability because of a conflict about which its actors paradoxically do not care : traditional currents conceive the modern novel as the appearance of an increasing opposition between the subject and the society ; it refers to a philosophic membership and succumbs to what R. Boudon names “ontological preconception”. Besides, several mythology specialists find down in the romantic kind the repetition of anhistoric mythems contradicting the vocation to produce a Weltanschauung. As it wishes to tune these contradictory theses, this article shows an epistemological relation of clarification between mythology and the sociology of novel. We use the recent science of the myths as a tool of partition between two types of literature answering different social needs : one was said realist, as a confrontation of the heroic interiority with the exteriority of the institution, the other one mythological, upgrading the mythical cosmodicy under a disguise adapted to each era. It is a matter of satisfying three ambitions : defending the specificity of the realistic novel and the signification of its genesis, rejecting a typology based on an ontology, and supporting the originality of the mythological novel identified as such in the adventure novel, the police novel, etc.