Rococo Fiction in France, 16001715

Rococo Fiction in France reconfigures the history of the long eighteenth century by revealing the rococo as a literary phenomenon that characterized a range of experimental texts from the end of the French Renaissance to the eve of the French Revolution. Tracing the literary rococos evolution from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, and exploring its radicalization during the 1670s, '80s, and '90s, Allison Stedman unearths the seventeenth century rococos counter-vision for the trajectory of the French monarchy and the dawn of the French Enlightenment. The first part of the study investigates the relationship between Montaignes philosophy of literary production and those of early seventeenth-century table-talk novelists, libertine writers, and playwrights involved in the quarrel over Corneilles play Le Cid. She thus establishes the existence of a rococo philosophy of literary production whose goal was to innovate, to bring pleasure, and to create communities. The second part of the study explores the impact that the Duchess de Montpensiers literary portrait galleries, Jean Donneau de Viss periodical the Mercure Galant, and other forms of rococo literary productionby such authors as Charles Sorel, Alcide de Saint-Maurice, J.N. de Parvial and Jean de Prchachad in the creation of a textually mediated social sphere that served as the foundation of the publicly critical culture of the French Enlightenment. The study concludes with an investigation of the influx of salon sociability into the textually mediated social sphere during the 1690s. Stedman examines the role of interpolated literary fairy tales, proverb plays and other rococo publication strategiesin such late seventeenth-century women writers as dAulnoy, Lhritier, Murat, and Durandin transfiguring the salon from an exclusive social circle mediated by physical presence to an inclusive social diaspora mediated by texts. Rococo Fiction in France challenges established views of early modern French literary history and discusses a range of little known works in a generous and engaging manner.