Eighteenth Century Fiction publishes articles in both English and French on all aspects of imaginative prose in the period 1700–1800, but will also examine papers on late 17th-century or early 19th-century fiction, particularly when the works are discussed in connection with the eighteenth century.
Vol. 19, no 4 (été 2007)
McMorran, Will.
Intertextuality and Urtextuality: Sade's Justine Palimpsest
Only relatively recently have all three incarnations of Sade's story of Justine become available in print at the same time, and this availability raises a number of new issues for the prospective reader. Although Michel Delon's Pléiade edition accommodates all three within a single volume, inviting the reader to begin with Les Infortunes de la vertu, continue with Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu, and end with La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu , few readers, other than those engaged in academic research or with a particular enthusiasm for Sade, will ever read more than one of the three "Justines." No single, authoritative text subordinates the others, and a strong sense of textual instability consequently permeates each of the variations of Justine's story. Sade reverses the direction of the typical writing process: text reverts to paratext, finished article reverts to rough draft as one version is consumed by the next. Nor does La Nouvelle Justine mark the end of this evolutionary narrative. A copy of La Nouvelle Justine seized by police in 1801, and covered in authorial annotations, suggests the beginning of a process that would...
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Garnai, Amy, ed.
Smith, Charlotte Turner, 1749-1806
A Letter from Charlotte Smith to the Publisher George Robinson
In the introduction to her comprehensive and meticulously annotated edition of the letters of the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749 1806), Judith Phillips Stanton writes that "the present volume of letters supplies ... almost all of the almost 500 surviving letters that Smith wrote to publishers, patrons, solicitors, relatives and friends." Among the letters not included in the collection is one to the publisher George Robinson, written while Smith's novel Desmond (1792) was in the final stages of preparation. This letter, located in the Dyce Collection of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, provides a vignette of Smith at work during a crucial stage of her career, and offers additional insights into the motivations that accompany the preparation of what would become her most politically explicit novel, by which she earned her radical credentials. Smith's letter to Robinson exhibits many of those features that characterize her correspondence with the publishers she worked with throughout her career a concern with technical detail as to the eventual length of the completed publication...
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Benharrech, Sarah, 1969-, ed.
Crébillon, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de, 1707-1777
Deux lettres inédites de Crébillon fils; à M.M. de La Place et de La Garde du Mercure de France et à Malesherbes
Deux lettres de Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon dit Crébillon fils ont été retrouvées depuis la publication de la « Correspondance » dans le tome 4 des oeuvres complètes éditées sous la direction de Jean Sgard. La première lettre, dont on ne connaît aucune version manuscrite, avait paru dans le Mercure de France du vivant de Crébillon tandis que la seconde a été partiellement publiée dans un catalogue de vente d'autographes. Nous voudrions remettre ces deux lettres dans le contexte de leur rédaction et plus largement les situer dans l'ensemble des lettres déjà publiées de Claude Crébillon. Ces deux lettres permettent d'établir avec plus d'exactitude le parcours biographique de notre auteur, en particulier les rapports qu'il entretint avec son père et la réputation de ce dernier, et de documenter ses tentatives de s'assurer des rentes en exerçant les fonctions de censeur. La première lettre datée du 15 novembre 1762 que nous reproduisons intégralement ci-dessous,...
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Hamilton, Patricia L.
Monkey Business: Lord Orville and the Limits of Politeness in Frances Burney's Evelina
In a journal entry in the spring of 1774, Frances Burney rendered her judgment of the newly published volume of letters that Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, had written over a period of thirty years to his illegitimate son, Philip Stanhope, starting in 1738, when the boy was six years old. Burney observed that the letters are "extremely well written" and contain "some excellent hints for Education," but they tend towards making Chesterfield's son "wholly unprincipled" by "inculcating immorality; countenancing all Gentlemanlike vices; advising deceit, and exhorting to Inconstancy." Although Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son was reviewed positively in the London Magazine and some of his advice excerpted in conduct manuals such as The Polite Preceptor (1776), Burney's verdict echoed the volume's generally negative reception. Complaints about the moral tenor of the work can be found both in private correspondence and in the public forum. Particularly objectionable was Chesterfield's intimation that young Stanhope could acquire polish by engaging in a discreet liaison with an...
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Weiss, Deborah
The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth's Female Philosopher
The radicalism of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of the social, political, and economic structures of her day has been beyond dispute since she achieved notoriety in the early 1790s. Maria Edgeworth, on the other hand, has never been considered a radical thinker despite the fact that she was as critical as Wollstonecraft of her society's gender codes and their effect on the moral and intellectual lives of women. At the level of theory, as well, Edgeworth resembled Wollstonecraft in her rejection of the period's essentialist understanding of gender. Like Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth took Enlightenment concepts of the cultural formation of the individual ideas used by radical male thinkers such as William Godwin to argue for the universal equality of "mankind" and applied these concepts to the formation of feminine identity. Both believed radically for the time that female attitudes and behaviours were the product of cultural, rather than natural influences. As Edgeworth's "first gentleman" in Letters to Literary Ladies remarks, "woman, as well as man, may be called a bundle of habits." What is remarkable about Edgeworth is that, despite...
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