Madame de Villedieu
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226144191
- eISBN:
- 9780226144214
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226144214.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
Known as Madame de Villedieu, Marie-Catherine Desjardins (ca. 1640–1683) was a prolific writer who played an important role in the evolution of the early modern French novel. One of the earliest ...
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Known as Madame de Villedieu, Marie-Catherine Desjardins (ca. 1640–1683) was a prolific writer who played an important role in the evolution of the early modern French novel. One of the earliest women to write for a living, she defied cultural convention by becoming an innovator and appealing to popular tastes through fiction, drama, and poetry. This book, a semi-autobiographical novel, portrays an enterprising woman who writes the story of her life, a complex tale that runs counter to social expectations and novelistic conventions. The story skillfully mixes real events from the author's life with fictional adventures.Less
Known as Madame de Villedieu, Marie-Catherine Desjardins (ca. 1640–1683) was a prolific writer who played an important role in the evolution of the early modern French novel. One of the earliest women to write for a living, she defied cultural convention by becoming an innovator and appealing to popular tastes through fiction, drama, and poetry. This book, a semi-autobiographical novel, portrays an enterprising woman who writes the story of her life, a complex tale that runs counter to social expectations and novelistic conventions. The story skillfully mixes real events from the author's life with fictional adventures.
Bethany Wiggin
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801476808
- eISBN:
- 9780801460074
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801476808.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations in French, English, German, and other European languages. This book ...
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Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations in French, English, German, and other European languages. This book charts just one of the paths by which newness—in its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novel—entered the European world in the decades around 1700. As readers across Europe snapped up novels, they domesticated the genre. Across borders, the novel lent readers everywhere a suggestion of sophistication, a familiarity with circumstances beyond their local ken. Into the eighteenth century, the modern German novel was not German at all; rather, it was French, as suggested by Germans' usage of the French word Roman to describe a wide variety of genres: pastoral romances, war and travel chronicles, heroic narratives, and courtly fictions. Carried in large part on the coattails of the Huguenot diaspora, these romans, nouvelles, amours secrets, histoires galantes, and histories scandaleuses shaped German literary culture to a previously unrecognized extent. The book contends that this French chapter in the German novel's history began to draw to a close only in the 1720s, more than sixty years after the word first migrated into German. Only gradually did the Roman go native; it remained laden with the baggage from its “French” origins even into the nineteenth century.Less
Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations in French, English, German, and other European languages. This book charts just one of the paths by which newness—in its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novel—entered the European world in the decades around 1700. As readers across Europe snapped up novels, they domesticated the genre. Across borders, the novel lent readers everywhere a suggestion of sophistication, a familiarity with circumstances beyond their local ken. Into the eighteenth century, the modern German novel was not German at all; rather, it was French, as suggested by Germans' usage of the French word Roman to describe a wide variety of genres: pastoral romances, war and travel chronicles, heroic narratives, and courtly fictions. Carried in large part on the coattails of the Huguenot diaspora, these romans, nouvelles, amours secrets, histoires galantes, and histories scandaleuses shaped German literary culture to a previously unrecognized extent. The book contends that this French chapter in the German novel's history began to draw to a close only in the 1720s, more than sixty years after the word first migrated into German. Only gradually did the Roman go native; it remained laden with the baggage from its “French” origins even into the nineteenth century.
Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300110319
- eISBN:
- 9780300128338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300110319.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter chronicles the beginning of prose fiction's popular form: the novel. Prose fiction has existed since classic times, although Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Eliza Haywood's Love in ...
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This chapter chronicles the beginning of prose fiction's popular form: the novel. Prose fiction has existed since classic times, although Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess, and Samuel Richardson's Pamela would all be considered examples of “the early novel.” Though before the eighteenth century there had already been in existence romances produced by the ancient Greeks as well as in the Middle Ages, by the sixteenth century, French romances had won over an expansive readership in England. The chapter focuses on the eighteenth century in marking the beginning of the novel, a period wherein novelists showed a certain interest in delineating psychological experience. Thus the chapter approaches the history of the novel from a new angle.Less
This chapter chronicles the beginning of prose fiction's popular form: the novel. Prose fiction has existed since classic times, although Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess, and Samuel Richardson's Pamela would all be considered examples of “the early novel.” Though before the eighteenth century there had already been in existence romances produced by the ancient Greeks as well as in the Middle Ages, by the sixteenth century, French romances had won over an expansive readership in England. The chapter focuses on the eighteenth century in marking the beginning of the novel, a period wherein novelists showed a certain interest in delineating psychological experience. Thus the chapter approaches the history of the novel from a new angle.
Hugh Adlington
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780746312957
- eISBN:
- 9781789629224
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9780746312957.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter considers the five short novels Fitzgerald wrote between 1977 and 1982: The Golden Child, The Bookshop, Offshore, Human Voices and At Freddie’s. Each of these ‘early’ novels draws upon ...
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This chapter considers the five short novels Fitzgerald wrote between 1977 and 1982: The Golden Child, The Bookshop, Offshore, Human Voices and At Freddie’s. Each of these ‘early’ novels draws upon Fitzgerald’s own life, and all but one contain female protagonists who resemble Fitzgerald herself either in her youth or middle-age. The chapter discusses the origins, themes and style of each novel, noting how each book has been received by critics and general readers since it was first published. The chapter argues that, to a certain extent, the early novels have unjustly been seen as mere apprentice work in preparation for Fitzgerald’s later historical fiction. This perspective risks underrating the earlier works’ particular qualities. These include the deft evocation of wholly believable times and places; finely observed characters swept along on cross-currents of thought, feeling and happenstance; sudden parabolic swerves in mood and story arising from the situations in which people find themselves; dialogue that is by turns oblique, elliptical and heartbreakingly frank; submerged but telling literary and topical allusions; and sharp criticism of cruelty in all its forms and corresponding sympathy for those who suffer from it.Less
This chapter considers the five short novels Fitzgerald wrote between 1977 and 1982: The Golden Child, The Bookshop, Offshore, Human Voices and At Freddie’s. Each of these ‘early’ novels draws upon Fitzgerald’s own life, and all but one contain female protagonists who resemble Fitzgerald herself either in her youth or middle-age. The chapter discusses the origins, themes and style of each novel, noting how each book has been received by critics and general readers since it was first published. The chapter argues that, to a certain extent, the early novels have unjustly been seen as mere apprentice work in preparation for Fitzgerald’s later historical fiction. This perspective risks underrating the earlier works’ particular qualities. These include the deft evocation of wholly believable times and places; finely observed characters swept along on cross-currents of thought, feeling and happenstance; sudden parabolic swerves in mood and story arising from the situations in which people find themselves; dialogue that is by turns oblique, elliptical and heartbreakingly frank; submerged but telling literary and topical allusions; and sharp criticism of cruelty in all its forms and corresponding sympathy for those who suffer from it.
Alex Eric Hernandez
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198846574
- eISBN:
- 9780191881657
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
This chapter reads Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) alongside dramatic precursors such as Charles Johnson’s Cælia; or, The Perjur’d Lover (1733) and public responses to the novel in order to argue ...
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This chapter reads Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) alongside dramatic precursors such as Charles Johnson’s Cælia; or, The Perjur’d Lover (1733) and public responses to the novel in order to argue that Richardson’s seminal text staged a debate over the basic interpretability through which affliction’s experience is navigable and thus ultimately made bearable. Responses to the novel are analyzed, tracing contemporary theories of poetic justice in order to account for readerly expectations and their frustration as crucial to Richardson’s broader moral project. In doing so, the chapter reads poetic justice as a secular theology against which tragedy is positioned. The chapter then turns to consider Clarissa’s own fractured response to her suffering, placing her “Meditations” in dialogue with the epistolary of the novel in order to analyze her rhetorical and practical responses to pain.Less
This chapter reads Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) alongside dramatic precursors such as Charles Johnson’s Cælia; or, The Perjur’d Lover (1733) and public responses to the novel in order to argue that Richardson’s seminal text staged a debate over the basic interpretability through which affliction’s experience is navigable and thus ultimately made bearable. Responses to the novel are analyzed, tracing contemporary theories of poetic justice in order to account for readerly expectations and their frustration as crucial to Richardson’s broader moral project. In doing so, the chapter reads poetic justice as a secular theology against which tragedy is positioned. The chapter then turns to consider Clarissa’s own fractured response to her suffering, placing her “Meditations” in dialogue with the epistolary of the novel in order to analyze her rhetorical and practical responses to pain.
