Poétiques du roman: Scudéry, Huet, Du Plaisir, et autres textes théoriques et critiques du XVIIe siècle sur le genre romanesque (review)

It would be difficult to overestimate the value of this critical anthology, which brings together nearly sixty prefaces and theoretical writings on the novel in the seventeenth century. Its principal focal points are three of the most important treatises of the century, Scudéry's preface to Ibrahim (1641), Huet's Traité de l'origine des romans, first published as the preface to Mme de Lafayette's Zayde (1670) and Du Plaisir's Sentiments sur les lettres (1683). Camille Esmein's edition of these three texts is a model of scholarly rigour, and clearly supersedes all previous editions. Around these works, she has placed a rich selection of other texts. The material is divided into different sections, as much conceptual as they are chronological in their focus; these include commentaries on various categories of novel (baroque, heroic, comic, the nouvelle), more general reflections on the genre, and early examples of what we would consider today to be literary criticism. Each individual text is introduced by an illuminating commentary, and each section is the subject of wide-ranging contextualisation. The edition of G. Berger, Pour et contre le roman: anthologie du discours théorique sur la fiction narrative en prose du XVII^e siècle (see FS, LI (1997), 463) reproduces some, but by no means all of the same texts, but in a collection which is much more limited in its scope. The volume does not (and could not) aim to be exhaustive, and it will always be possible to imagine other choices: Camus's Éloge des histoires dévotes, for instance, or Sorel's preface(s) to Francion. However, as if to anticipate such regrets, Esmein has included in an appendix an analytical bibliography of all seventeenth-century writings on the novel, indicating shelf marks of editions in the BnF, Arsenal or British Library, and/or giving details of facsimile or modern critical editions. For each work not included in her edition, she has provided a brief, but penetrating note on its content and importance. Introducing the anthology as a whole, Esmein presents, and discreetly re-examines not only the seventeenth-century debates about the nature and function of the novel, but also the ways in which scholars of our time have construed the 'development' of fiction in this period. She recognizes that to see the emergence of the nouvelle in terms of a radical break from preceding practices is to risk succumbing to the self-validating rhetoric of many prefaces. She does nevertheless underline the importance of the 1660s as a decade when essentially self-defensive or particularized writings develop into more general reflections on the poetics of fiction; it is from this point, she argues, that the novel is first truly conceived and constituted as a genre. All in all, this is an indispensable reference tool for anybody working on the novel or on the poetics of the seventeenth century; it is unlikely to be superseded for decades. Dix-septiémistes owe a debt of gratitude to Camille Esmein for a volume which is both imaginatively conceived and flawlessly executed, and to Champion for publishing it.