Richard L. Frautschi

French Prose Fiction Published between 1701 and 1750: A New Profile of Production

Histories of the European novel, however defined—and French prose fiction in particular—generally concur that a taste for prose narrative, ofwhatever length or ilk, expanded explosively during the eighteenth century. Following the invention of the printing press in the late Middle Ages, a new leisure product, which at its origin addressed a limited clientele of well-born readers, by the late Enlightenment targeted both an hereditary gentry and a rapidly expanding cohort of middle-class consumers. The geographic expansion of European and New World readership, which could now choose between a still-voluminousproduction ofdramatic works and the competing genre of prose fiction, was not limited to large population centres. Rather, with an increase in the number of presses, autonomous or in consortia, and increasinglysophisticated networks of distributors, some with mail-order catalogues, urban as well as country readers could obtain new titles as well as re-editions ofpopular early and contemporaryworks. To support these broad generalizations about the Enlightenment book trade, we propose to concentrate on the production of prose fiction during the first half of the eighteenth century. The numbers that follow have been extrapolated from the nearly completed manuscript of our forthcoming Bibliographie du genre romanesque

Lexical and focal preferences in Rousseau'sProfession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard (Book IV ofEmile)

Based on the ARTFL version of theProfession and excerpts fromEmile, high frequency function and content words, as defined by Brunet, are analyzed via Pearson chi square tests. Next, four measures of narrative voice from the same populations are compared using Markovian chains and further chi square tests. In a third analysis the two orders of evidence are juxtaposed. The lexical and narratological preferences of theVicaire and theGouverneur, while not resolving the problematic of chronological composition (Burgelin, 1969), highlight the distinctiveness of each character.

Geo-Ethnicity, Epistolary Affect, and Reception in French Prose Fiction of the Enlightenment: An Experiment in Data Analysis

As literary studies move increasingly to the use of machine-readable texts, some precoded with markers of external and internal features, the availability of documents in database formats1 will undoubtedly influence the direction of future criticism. The present article is an exercise in the use of an expanded Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1700-1800 (hereafter MMF-2),2 a bibliographic database of Enlightenment French prose fiction. I have extrapolated two types of data— indicators of geo-ethnicity and epistolarity—from precoded lists, showing the relative variables of each throughout the eighteenth century. To these are juxtaposed a taxonomy of interlocutory relationships between senders and receivers observed in four eighteenth-century French epistolary novels, selected as experimental samples. While juxtaposing geo-ethnicity