Rococo Fiction in France reconfigures the history of the "long
eighteenth century" by revealing the rococo as a literary phenomenon
that characterized a range of experimental texts from the end of the
French Renaissance to the eve of the French Revolution. Tracing the
literary rococo's evolution from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, and
exploring its radicalization during the 1670s, '80s, and '90s, Allison
Stedman unearths the seventeenth century rococo's counter-vision for the
trajectory of the French monarchy and the dawn of the French
Enlightenment. The first part of the study investigates the relationship
between Montaigne's philosophy of literary production and those of early
seventeenth-century "table-talk" novelists, libertine writers, and
playwrights involved in the quarrel over Corneille's play Le Cid. She
thus establishes the existence of a rococo philosophy of literary
production whose goal was to innovate, to bring pleasure, and to create
communities. The second part of the study explores the impact that the
Duchess de Montpensier's literary portrait galleries, Jean Donneau de
Visé's periodical the Mercure Galant, and other forms of rococo literary
production-by such authors as Charles Sorel, Alcide de Saint-Maurice,
J.N. de Parvial and Jean de Préchac-had in the creation of a textually
mediated social sphere that served as the foundation of the publicly
critical culture of the French Enlightenment. The study concludes with
an investigation of the influx of salon sociability into the textually
mediated social sphere during the 1690s. Stedman examines the role of
interpolated literary fairy tales, proverb plays and other rococo
publication strategies-in such late seventeenth-century women writers as
d'Aulnoy, Lhéritier, Murat, and Durand-in transfiguring the salon from
an exclusive social circle mediated by physical presence to an inclusive
social diaspora mediated by texts. Rococo Fiction in France challenges
established views of early modern French literary history and discusses
a range of little known works in a generous and engaging manner.
