- A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction by Ellen R. Welch
A taste for exotic names, locations, and customs marks French fiction from the first half of the eighteenth century, and can be found in that century’s fairy tales, libertine fiction, and epistolary philosophical novels. This vogue wanes in the second half of the century, losing much of its appeal by 1789. Its origins may be traced, in part, to the influence of Antoine Galland’s publication of Les Mille et une nuits. Ellen Welch examines French fiction from the period before Galland’s work, arguing that the exotic, and by extension foreignness, was a crucial aesthetic category for the development of French prose fiction. Welch ties the importance of Otherness in French prose from 1550–1715 to French writers’ “self-critical comprehension of the aesthetic pleasure to be gained from evocations of foreignness” (xvii). Welch studies “the intersection of knowledge and pleasure” (vii) that readers experience through fiction’s engagement with the exotic. [End Page 641]
In chapter 1, “Fiction and the Aesthetics of Foreignness,” Welch evaluates the status of the novel in early modern France, building on the work of Georges May. Through close readings of Jacques Amyot’s Histoire éthiopique (1547), Scudéry’s Clélie, and Pierre-Daniel Huet’s writings on the origins of the novel, Welch ties the practice of writing fiction to exoticism, arguing that the novel’s legitimacy was linked to the idea that it was “not only a classical genre but a global one” (10) and that “a trace of undomesticated foreignness is required if a novel is going to delight its readers” (15). Early modern readers approached the novel as a source of both entertainment and reliable information, and their desire for verisimilitude pushed writers beyond “superficial evocations of foreignness” (20). Readers approached these fictions as providing an avenue for armchair travel, in which “foreign spaces became ideal fictional terrains on which novelists could imagine new types of communities and relationships and new models of behavior and heroism while still remaining true to domestic aesthetic and social norms” (21). Welch echoes Prévost’s claims in the preface to Manon Lescaut, suggesting that “fiction’s value resides precisely in its ability to offer the reader vicarious, new experiences” (23).
Chapter 2, “Armchair Conquests: Heroic Romance and the Cartographies of Desire,” extends her discussion of “armchair travel” to the rhetorical strategies employed by heroic romance writers from 1620 to 1660 that allowed the reader to “participate in discovery rather than merely following along” (29). According to Welch, it was travel, cast in the register of fiction, that created “the possibility for critical reflection on the passions that motivate the reader’s desire to consume and intellectually ‘possess’ knowledge about foreign lands” (31). Welch notes that, in Gomberville’s 1637 Polexandre, the main character’s origins “parallel the expansion of Europe’s epistemological empire during the early modern period” (33) and points out that, through the novel’s use of “mapping,” the reader shifts “from a mode of discovery toward one of acquisition, possession, and domination” (36). Turning to Scudéry’s work, Welch reconsiders the reader’s drive to conquest in the early modern novel, arguing that the Carte de Tendre’s turn to the interior landscape offers “the displacement of an outward imperial gaze toward the intimate space of the self ” (49).
In chapter 3, “Cosmopolitan Seductions: City Guides and Parisian Novels,” Welch explores the role that Paris played in seventeenth-century French fiction as a site offering French readers a sense of national pride, while also underscoring their profound alienation from the capital. Through an analysis of the Mercure Galant, Furetière’s Le Roman bourgeois (1669), and Jean de Préchac’s L’Illustre Parisienne (1679), Welch contemplates the intersection of “France’s cultural domination of foreign [End Page 642] élites” with “Louis xiv’s military campaign...