A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French FictionA Taste for the Foreign examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot's 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. While fantastic storylines and elements of magic were increasingly shunned by a neo-classicist literary culture that valued verisimilitude above all else, writers and critics surmised that the depiction of exotic lands could offer a superior source for the novelty, variety, and marvelousness that constituted fiction's appeal. In this sense, early modern fiction presents itself as privileged site for thinking through the literary and cultural stakes of exoticism, or the taste for the foreign. Long before the term 'exoticism' came into common parlance in France, fiction writers thus demonstrated their understanding of the special kinds of aesthetic pleasure produced by evocations of foreignness, developing techniques to simulate those delights through imitations of the exotic. As early modern readers eagerly consumed travel narratives, maps, and international newsletters, novelists discovered ways to blur the distinction between true and imaginary representations of the foreign, tantalizing readers with an illusion of learning about the faraway lands that captured their imaginations. This book analyzes the creative appropriations of those scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places. Concentrating on the most successful examples of some of the most important sub-genres of prose fiction in the long seventeenth century—heroic romances, shorter urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages—the book examines how these types of fiction creatively appropriate the scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places. |
Contents
Fiction and the Aesthetics of Foreignness | 1 |
Armchair Conquests Heroic Romance and the Cartographies of Desire | 27 |
Cosmopolitan Seductions City Guides and Parisian Novels | 51 |
Secret Agents Foreign Courts International Voyeurism in Memoir Fictions | 83 |
Consuming Curiosities in Extraordinary Voyage Fictions | 113 |
Lutile et lagréable in the Age of Orientalism | 143 |
Other editions - View all
A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early ... Ellen R. Welch No preview available - 2011 |
A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early ... Ellen R. Welch No preview available - 2011 |
Common terms and phrases
adventures aesthetic Amyot Antoine Galland autres Blanche Blanche’s bourgeois cartographic characters Charles Sorel Courtilz critics cultural curieux curiosity Cyrano de Bergerac Cyrus Cyrus’s d’Aulnoy’s d’une depictions describes desire discourses domestic early modern Europe Early Modern France edited empire Europe European example exotic exoticism foreign French readers Furetiere’s galant galanterie Galland genre genre’s geographical German Gomberville Grand heroic romance Histoire Honoré Champion Huet Ibid imagined jacques Amyot Jean L’Histoire L’Illustre Parisienne l’on lands lbid literary Literature Livres Louis XIV Madeleine Madeleine de Scudéry memoirs Mercure Galant monde narrative fiction narrator narrator’s novel novelists nuits objects Oeuvres paratexts Paris Parisian Pierre pleasure Polexandre Polexandre’s political Pre'chac’s prince prose fiction qu’elle qu’il qu’on reading recounting Renaissance representations Rochefort roman romanesque Sadeur Scude'ry Scudéry seventeenth century siecle social story tion tout translatio studii translation travel narratives truth University Press Veiras voyage writing XVIIe siècle