Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission ed. by Jacqueline Glomski, Isabelle Moreau (review)

The raison d’être of this collection of eleven articles, to which Isabelle Moreau strives to give some focus, is summarized in her initial assertion that ‘Innovation in prose fiction took Europe by storm during the seventeenth century’ (p. 1). The volume springs from a Warburg Institute seminar series on the cross-cultural relationships of seventeenth-century European prose fiction with sources, tradition, genre, transmission, translation, publication, and reception. In the first section, entitled ‘Text’, Nandini Das elucidates the potential of self-conscious artifice in Don Quixote, The Winter’s Tale, and the fiction of Mary Wroth. Thibaut Maus de Rolley exploits a witchcraft pamphlet published in London in 1612, a year after its unhappy subject was burnt at the stake in Aix-en-Provence, in order to explore issues of textual transmission and the boundaries between fact and invention. Jacqueline Glomski contends that John Barclay’s Argenis of 1621 was the first of a new genre, the political romance, in which contemporary questions of debate are woven into a love story. Nicolas Correard, using the evidence of Barclay’s Euphormio, Cervantes’s Dialogue of the Dogs, and Claireville’s Gascon extravagant, assesses the ways in which comic and picaresque writers parodied works of demonology, and in so doing fought the humanistic, sceptical fight against superstition a century before Voltaire’s ‘Écrasez l’infâme’. This first part concludes with Camille Esmein-Sarrazin’s examination of Mme de Lafayette’s handling of fact and fiction, as novelist and writer of memoirs (to which the usual caveats about authorship must apply). The second part, ‘Transmission’, opens with Warren Boutcher’s scrutiny of Don Quixote, and its early sources, as an exemplar of translation, intercultural exchange, and transnational reinvention that escaped Cervantes’s control. Brenda Hosington’s assessment of the first translations into English, by Susan Du Verger, of stories by Jean-Pierre Camus, concludes that they belonged to a covert movement of reconversion of England to Rome. The next two contributions deal with mid-century English translations of Romance narratives: Alice Eardley reviews the practices of the publisher Humphrey Moseley, and speculates that translations of La Calprenède and Madeleine de Scudéry were more widely read than imagined; and Helen Moore uses the bookseller Francis Kirkman’s publication of translations of Amadis de Gaule and an additional adventure romance as testimony to the transitional, unstable state of mid-century English fiction. Guyda Armstrong, for her part, draws wide-ranging political, sociological, and cultural conclusions from the 1652 English translation of a collection of novellas from the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti. This collection of papers is rounded off by Ros Ballaster’s study of the transmission of French prose fiction to the Restoration English stage, by dramatists such as Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee: her tentative conclusion, that ‘to fully animate an imaginative conception may be [ . . . ] to deaden aesthetic experience’ (p. 197), deserves further debate. Although this study cannot claim to address all aspects of seventeenth-century fiction, as its title promises, most readers are sure to find some enlightenment and stimulation within its pages, depending on their different tastes and interests. Firmer editing might have made the 731 footnotes (many of them lengthy) less intrusive.