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7 - Prose fiction: France

from GENRES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
English Showalter
Edited by
H. B. Nisbet  and
Claude Rawson
H. B. Nisbet
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Claude Rawson
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

The debate in the classical era: roman and nouvelle

Introduction

Fictional prose narratives of several types were popular in France throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Some have always been called rotnans, the standard word for the English term ‘novel’. The history of the French novel therefore begins in the early medieval period; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the genre achieved new prominence and stature. A serious critical discourse on the novel existed in France well before 1670. Romans - especially those of d'Urfé, Gomberville, La Calprenède, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry - were discussed in the salons, in authors' prefaces, and even in writings by scholars and academicians like Chapelain, Ménage, Segrais, Boileau, Furetière, and Huet.

A different but equally significant concern for the theory and practice of fiction appears in French imitations of Cervantes's Don Quixote (translated in 1614) by writers such as Charles Sorel and Paul Scarron. Spain also introduced France to the novela, a shorter and less exotic genre than the heroic rotnans. Early translations and imitations emphasized the verisimilitude of the new form; Segrais's Nouvelles françoises (1656) stated succinctly a key problem for theorists of the novel: ‘the difference between the Roman and the Nouvelle [is] that the Roman writes things as propriety wishes them and in the manner of a poet; but the Nouvelle must take a bit more from History, and try rather to give the images of things as we ordinarily see them happen, than as our imagination figures them’ (I, p. 146).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 210 - 237
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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