Transformations du genre romanesque

Transformations du genre romanesque English Showalter In the pastfew years, when I taughtcourses on eighteenth-centuryFrench literature in English translation to American undergraduates, I would often begin by showing brief clips from three Disney animated films: Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella. The students never had any difficulty identifying the films, but had only wild guesses to answer the question "What do these films have to do with this course?" They are, of course, all works of French fiction from the long eighteenth century, and an impressive demonstration of how much that old and foreign culture is still alive and familiar in middle-class twenty-first-century southern New Jersey. Readers of Eighteenth-Century Fiction would know the answer to my question, but even they sometimes need to be reminded, I think, of the diversity ofthe field so succinctly named in thejournal's title. ForAladdin ou la lampe merveilleuse, La Belle et la bête, and Cendrillon are far removed from what English speakers usually mean by "novel" or French speakers by "roman." They are tales of the supernatural, of fairies and génies, of spells and enchantments. They are short. They derive from folk traditions. They are, and always were, regarded as children's literature. Prose fiction as it flourished and evolved in France in the eighteenth century was marked by a profusion of subgenres. Some were obviously modern descendants of traditional forms such as the epic or tales in the style of Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, and Cervantes. Some were parodie or burlesque versions of those traditional forms. Around the end EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 13, numéros 2-3, janvier-avril 2001 140 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION of the seventeenth century, however, it became commonplace to compose fictional imitations of virtually all genres. History was an obvious target, not only narrative chronicles and annals, but the primary materials, like memoirs and correspondences. Travellers and explorers provided another rich lode, both for the recital of fictitious individuals' adventures and for the description of imaginary societies. The narrative devices were also applied to ordinary lives; one did not have to play a role in great historical events to have an interesting life to recall or fascinating letters to write. As noted already, the fantastic thrived alongside an incipient push towards realism, and the two trends were not necessarily in conflict, for science fictions, devil stories, fairy tales, and exotic enchantments could be the narrative pretexts for exposing inaccessible or forbidden aspects ofreality. Like several of the contributors to this volume, I was a graduate student who studied with Georges May, and I owe my own interest in the eighteenth-century novel to his inspiring teaching and ground-breaking research . It is highly appropriate that he should open this collection with a retrospective look at the field on which he has had so much influence. I do not know whether he will be amused or distressed to learn that a decade after he bought a copy of Pierre Lièvre's 1929 edition of the Œuvres de Crébillon fils at Le Divan in Paris, I was still able to buy one for myself in 1960. It is a numbered edition, and I have number 1396 of a total of 1500, so I doubt that I was the last to enjoy this unexpected windfall before the numbers ofCrébillon's admirers grew enough to keep his principal works in print. There was a widely accepted thesis about the history ofthe French novel in those days, perhaps the closest French literary scholarship has come to a "Rise ofthe Novel" theory. The most vigorous and persuasive proponents were Servais Etienne and Daniel Mornet, and in a nutshell their argument was that Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse had conferred literary status on the genre. This one novel's unprecedented popularity and its evident moral seriousness allegedly overwhelmed the conservative enemies offiction and imposed a new set ofconventions on readers and novelists. Mornet devoted a substantial part of his monumental 1925 edition of La Nouvelle Héloïse to a bibliography of eighteenth-century novels, divided chronologically into 1740-60 and 1760-80, and further divided by genres, intended to document the...