This volume is a study of the interdisciplinary nature of prison escape tales and their impact on European cultural identity in the eighteenth century. Prison escape narratives are reflections of the tension between the individuals potential happiness via freedom and the confines of the social order. Contemporary readers identified with the prisoner, who, like them suffered the injustices of an absolutist regime. The state imprisons such renegades not just out of a desire to protect the public but more importantly to protect the state itself. Hence, prison escape tales can be linked with a revolutionary tendency: when free, such former detainees equipped with a pen openly and justly challenge the status quo, hoping to inspire their readers to do the same. Escape tales have had a considerable impact on cultural identity, because they embody the interdependent relationship between literature and myth on the one hand and literature and history on the other.
Recenzijas
Beyond the sheer entertainment value of the stories themselves (who would fail to be amused by Louis Dominique Cartouches adventures or enthralled with the scandal and gossip surrounding the Affair of the Necklace?), there is much to learn in this volume about eighteenth-century French popular culture and the shifting perception of those who escaped from prison in the period. Each essay brings a wealth of archival information and critical perspectives to its object of study and develops the central argument laid out by the two editors in their introduction.... Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales makes a convincing case that escape narratives should be considered important moments in the development and reinforcement of values that have become central to our understanding of the Enlightenment period. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *
| A Note on Translations |
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vii | |
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ix | |
| Acknowledgments |
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xi | |
| Introduction |
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xiii | |
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1 A Model for Eighteenth-Century Recits d'evasion: Odysseus's Flight from Polyphemus's Cave |
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1 | (24) |
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2 The "Slippery Eel": Escape Episodes and Ideological Ambiguity in Eighteenth-Century Criminal Biographies, The Cases of Louis-Dominique Cartouche and John Sheppard |
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25 | (16) |
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3 Having a Cage in Her Hand: Escaping Representations of Comtesse de La Motte-Valois |
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41 | (16) |
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4 Du plaisir dans ma solitude: Finding Pleasure in the Prisons of Manon Lescaut |
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57 | (12) |
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5 Utopia as a Prison: Escaping from the Land of Happiness in Tyssot de Patot's Les Voyages et Avantures de Jaques Masse |
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69 | (12) |
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81 | (4) |
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| Notes |
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| Bibliography |
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85 | (32) |
| Index |
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117 | (12) |
| About the Contributors |
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129 | |
Michael J. Mulryan is associate professor of French at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. His research focuses primarily on the representation of urban space and the marginalized in eighteenth-century French literature. He has published several articles on Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Jean-Franēois Marmontel, and lAbbé Bucquoy, which have appeared in academic journals, such as 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, XVIII: New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, Cithara: Essays in Judeo-Christian Tradition, Dalhousie French Studies, and LÉrudit Franco-Espagnol.
Denis Grélé is associate professor of French at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. His research interests are French Utopias in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He is the author of Travailler en utopie: Les Condamnés du Bonheur (1675-1789) (2009), and of numerous articles on Lesage, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Madame de la Guette, and utopia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in academic journals, such as Les Cahiers du XVIIčme sičcle, LÉrudit Franco-Espagnol, Neophilologus, Seventeenth-Century Studies, and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth xCentury.
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