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7 - The Early French Novel and the Circum-Atlantic

from Part II - The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

This chapter provides an overview of the French circum-Atlantic novel, as written primarily by metropolitan whites, between 1697 and 1807—the period in which both the French novel and French slavery evolved. The chapter links canonical novels, such as Prevost's Manon Lescaut and Voltaire's Candide, to the major themes and narrative mapping of less well-known colonial fictions by Alexandre-Olivier Oexmelin, Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, Germaine de Staël, and Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, and others. The chapter summarizes some of the major critical explanations for the relative paucity of representations of slavery in eighteenth-century French fiction as well as some accounts of colonial reading and writing among whites and people of colour in French Caribbean colonies. It argues that the French circum-Atlantic novel evolved as an imaginative space in which chattel slavery was transformed into an aesthetic atmosphere for depicting human enslavement to passion rather than human enslavement to humans. Emerging as the characteristic element of this fiction, the harangue spoken by the revolting slave leader or abused woman of colour translated historical slavery into a colonial hamartia, the internal flaw or enslavement to destiny.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Aravamudan, Srinivas, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broccardo, Laura, ‘“Penser aux frontières du politique” le “cas” Zulma de Germaine de Staël’, Dix-huitième siècle, 47 (2015), 409–28Google Scholar
Charara, Youmna (ed.), Fictions coloniales du XVIIIe siècle, Ziméo, Lettres africaines, Adonis, ou le bon nègre, anecdote coloniale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005)Google Scholar
Cheek, Pamela, Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheek, Pamela, Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curran, Andrew, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobie, Madeleine, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010)Google Scholar
Douthwaite, Julia V., ‘How Bad Economic Memories are made: John Law’s System in Les Lettres persanes, Manon Lescaut and “The Great Mirror of Folly”’, L’Esprit Créateur, 55.3 (2015), 4458.Google Scholar
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Sala-Molins, Louis, Le Code noir: ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987)Google Scholar
Weber, Caroline, ‘The Sins of the Father: Colonialism and Family History in Diderot’s Le Fils naturel’, PMLA, 118.3 (2003), 488501.Google Scholar

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