Chapter 1 Introduction: Manufacturing Foreignness: Exoticism, Commodities, and the Novel Chapter 2 Chapter 1: Fiction and the Aesthetics of Foreignness Chapter 3 Chapter 2: Armchair Conquests: Heroic Romance and the Cartographies of Desire Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Cosmopolitan Seductions: City Guides and Parisian Novels Chapter 5 Chapter 4: Secret Agents, Foreign Courts: International Voyeurism in Memoir Fictions Chapter 6 Chapter 5: Consuming Curiosities in Extraordinary Voyage Novels Chapter 7 Epilogue: L'utile et l'agreable in the Age of Orientalism
Ellen R. Welch is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies in the Romance Languages Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In the Medamothi episode of Rabelais's Quart Livre can be found the
first use of the word "exotique." Although based on the Greek word
for foreign, this word took on more connotations than merely
etrange. As she writes in her introduction, Welch (Univ. of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill) "examines how the fashion for (artificial)
foreignness manifested itself in the production of prose fiction
... and how it inspired formal innovations as well as new settings
for fictional content." She gives equal attention to the aesthetic
dimension of literary and historical conditions of the production
of this fiction, dealing with the roman heroique, city guides and
Parisian novels, secret memoirs, and voyage novels. She concludes
by looking at the idea of Orientalism, for which, according to her,
"The Thousand and One Nights [tr., Antoine Galland, 1704-1715]
stands, in some sense, as a literary index of European
Orientalism." Although the book is interesting, the audience for
this volume will probably be somewhat limited because it assumes an
extensive knowledge of (primarily) 17th-century literature. *
CHOICE *
Welsh has written a highly rewarding book that constitutes a major
contribution to seventeenth-century French studies * H-France
Review *
This book is a pleasurable and readable contribution to the growing
critical literature on orientalism and exoticism in early modern
French studies....It concentrates on seventeenth-century prose
fiction, covering heroic romances, urban novels, fictional memoirs,
and extraordinary voyages....What this book gains in concentrating
on the more emblematic and less familiar examples of `exotic'
fiction is a coherence and conviction in its argument for the
particular pleasures of the form. * Oxford Journals *
Welch offers unique, thought-provoking, and original close readings
of seventeenth-century French fiction * Eighteenth-Century Fiction
*
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