The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641-1782 (Princeton Legacy Library)
Language: English
Pages: 382
ISBN: 0691646406
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In France between 1641 and 1782 the romance developed into the novel. Mr. Showalter's intensive study of the novel, particularly during the critical period 1700-1720, shows that an important movement toward nineteenth century realism was taking place. To trace this development the author has selected five phenomena--time, space, names, money, and the narrator--and follows their treatment throughout the period to show why romance tended toward the novel.
To show the working-out of these ideas there is a detailed analysis of one novel, Robert Challe's Les Illustres Francoises, which can be precisely located in the chain of literary influence. Its central theme of the individual in conflict with society was well suited to the forms available to the eighteenth century novelist. Consequently it appears repeatedly in important novels of the period, showing that the evolutionary process worked to some degree even on subject matter.
Originally published in 1972.
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de Clemes et du chevalier de Pervanes (1716), reviews the history of the genre, distinguishing between "Ie bon gout" and "Ie gout du siecle"; the latter he blames for both accrediting and discrediting the romans.38 Perhaps there is no better explanation. 87 Du Plaisir, Sentiment sur les Lettres et sur I'Histoire, 1683, in Coulet, Anthologie, p. 88: ". . . c'est depuis peu seulement que l'on a invente les Nouvelles." 88 Sacy, Histoire du marquis de Clemes et du chevalier de Pervanes, 1716,
or Balzac—as the definitive form of the novel, and then trace its most noticeable features in a direct line all the way back to Furetiere, Scarron, Sorel, Rabelais, and the taletellers of the Middle Ages.3 I do not believe that this gives any truer a picture of the situation in the early eighteenth century. Evolution goes forward, not backward, and none of the early novelists had foreknowledge of what would happen 3 See for example Andre Le Breton, Le Roman au XVIII0 Steele (Paris: Societe
Marivaux and Lesage still found value in them. The dominant approach to reality in fiction, however, relied on the novel's assumed kinship with history. A satisfactory theoretical statement of historical verisimilitude had been achieved by Georges de Scudery in his preface to Ibrahim in 1641. It held that the novelist was bound to respect known historical events: battles, treaties, deaths, marriages, and the like; but that the circumstances, such as conversations, and the private lives,
he has not been able to demonstrate how society produced change in the novel, or even that it did. Watt's approach is out of the question for French fiction, in any case, because of the scanty sociological information now available. There is virtually no general study, for instance, of the social and economic background of seventeenth and eighteenth-century novelists. Only the major men of letters have inspired such investigation, and most of them only recently.4 With regard to the reading
trans lator, and thus finally to the reader. Like Cervantes and Scarron, Challe sensed the potential value of fiction, and illustrated a new and better style by the tales he scattered throughout his sequel to Don Quixote. Sev eral of them foreshadow Les lllustres Francoises, and one in particular, L'Histoire de Sainville et de Sylvie, dominates 63 Challe, sequel to Don Quixote, Vol. V, Livre i, ch. 1, p. 2. 120 Techniques of Realism in Early Fiction the whole sequel. In it, Challe treats
