Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Conventions
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Beginnings: From the Late Medieval to Madame de Lafayette
- Part II The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage
- 7 The Early French Novel and the Circum-Atlantic
- 8 Anglo-French Relations and the Novel in the Eighteenth Century
- 9 The Fiction of Diderot and Rousseau
- 10 The Memoir Novel
- 11 Epistolary Fiction: The Novel in the Postal Age
- 12 The Libertine Novel
- 13 Sade and the Novel
- Part III After the Revolution: The Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Part IV From Naturalism to the Nouveau Roman
- Part V Fictions of the Fifth Republic: From de Gaulle to the Internet Age
- Index
- References
10 - The Memoir Novel
from Part II - The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2021
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Conventions
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Beginnings: From the Late Medieval to Madame de Lafayette
- Part II The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage
- 7 The Early French Novel and the Circum-Atlantic
- 8 Anglo-French Relations and the Novel in the Eighteenth Century
- 9 The Fiction of Diderot and Rousseau
- 10 The Memoir Novel
- 11 Epistolary Fiction: The Novel in the Postal Age
- 12 The Libertine Novel
- 13 Sade and the Novel
- Part III After the Revolution: The Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Part IV From Naturalism to the Nouveau Roman
- Part V Fictions of the Fifth Republic: From de Gaulle to the Internet Age
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter focuses on the proliferation of novels in the early decades of the eighteenth century that assumed the form of personal memoirs. Acknowledging arguments that link this new style of writing to demands for greater narrative plausibility, it also considers the popularity of the form in relation to the social upheavals driven by the increasing mobility of people and the flow of money associated with modernity and globalisation. It argues that the first-person form enabled novelists in this period to explore the importance of the novelistic imagination as a tool for adapting to difference and cultural change, foregrounding the use of narrative by those on the move in negotiating personal identity and social relationships. With particular reference to novels by Crébillon, Prévost, Marivaux and Lesage, it examines the different ways in which protagonists struggle to become authors and thereby exercise greater control over their lives, pointing to how the memoir-novel played a formative role in constructing the concept of an autobiographical subject and the contours of modern autobiography.
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- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French , pp. 187 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021