French Prose Fiction Published between 1701 and 1750: A New Profile of Production

French Prose Fiction Published between 1701 and 1750: A New Profile of Production Richard Frautschi and Angus Martin Histories of the European novel, however defined—and French prose fiction in particular—generally concur that a taste for prose narrative, ofwhatever length or ilk, expanded explosively during the eighteenth century. Following the invention of the printing press in the late Middle Ages, a new leisure product, which at its origin addressed a limited clientele of well-born readers, by the late Enlightenment targeted both an hereditary gentry and a rapidly expanding cohort of middle-class consumers. The geographic expansion of European and New World readership, which could now choose between a still-voluminous production ofdramatic works and the competing genre of prose fiction, was not limited to large population centres. Rather, with an increase in the number of presses, autonomous or in consortia, and increasinglysophisticated networks of distributors, some with mail-order catalogues, urban as well as country readers could obtain new titles as well as re-editions of popular early and contemporary works. To support these broad generalizations about the Enlightenment book trade, we propose to concentrate on the production of prose fiction during the first half of the eighteenth century. The numbers that follow have been extrapolated from the nearly completed manuscript of our forthcoming Bibliographie du genre romanesque EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 736EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION français, 1700-1800, or MMF-2.1 In gathering material for the Bibliographie we have taken as our starting point the evidence of production in earlier periods presented in lists of titles by W.F.J. DeJongh for the pre-classical period, R.C. Williams, R.W. Baldner, and M. Lever for the seventeenth century, and S.P. Jones and F. Weil for the early eighteenth century.2 To the labours of our predecessors we have added results from our own searches in a wide range of source materials and libraries in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as in North America and Australasia. In this article we offer overall data on levels of production of first editions and re-editions, on the most prolific authors of fiction of the period, and on the most reprinted fiction titles. We also provide two illustrations ofthe type ofmore detailed interrogations that the new bibliography will permit: what we can learn from the most commonly used words in titles; and what our corpus has to tell us about putative places of publication and publishers. Part 1 : Overview An overview of the publication of French prose fiction from the beginning of printing to the end of the eighteenth century produces the following broad-brush profile of titles, including translations and a small number ofmarginal works: 1400-1599, 350; 1600-1700, 1,200; 1701-50, 1,000; 1751-75, 1,000; 1776-1800, 1,600. Starting in the late Middle Ages a growing pan-European appetite for prose fiction written in French describes an exponential curve which doubles in numerical volume within a progressive reduction of chronological compartments, a trend which seemingly has continued to the 1 An enlarged edition of Angus Martin, Vivienne G. Mylne, and Richard Frautschi, Bibliographie du genre romanesauefrançais, 1 751-1800 (London: Mameli; Paris: France-Expansion, 1977), MMF-2 will cover the years 1700 to 1800. The death of our collaborator Vivienne Mylne in 1992 has been not only a personal loss but also a cause of unavoidable delay in our project. We pay tribute here to her immense contribution to the new edition. And we acknowledge the support of our universities and of research funding bodies in three countries over a period of nearly twenty years. 2 W.FJ. Dejongh, A Bibliography ofthe Novel and Short Story in Frenchfrom the Beginning ofPrinting till 1600, University ofNew Mexico Bulletin, Bibliographical Series 1:1 (University of New Mexico Press, 1944); R.C. Williams and R.W. Baldner, Bibliography ofthe Seventeenth Century Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); M. Lever, La Fiction narrative en prose au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1976); S.P. Jones, A List ofFrench Prose Fictionfrom 1 700 to 1 750 (NewYork: Wilson, 1939) ; F. Weil, L...