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Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission

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Workshop 2 – Notes

By Isabelle M M Moreau, on 25 June 2013

British Academy Project

Seventeenth-Century: Text and Transmission

Workshop 2 – Notes (taken by J. Glomski)

Friday, 3 May 2013

Panel I

Roderick Beaton – ‘“Golden Monuments Hammered out of Words”: The Rhetoric of Love in Greek Fiction (1135-1600)’

No generic distinction between novel and romance in Greek. Emerging tradition – 2nd Crusade passed through Constantinople in 1147. Hysmine and Hysminias was the only work of medieval Greek fiction with reception in the West. Continued to be read & copied down to the 18th century.

Hysmine and Hysminias  — a first-person story, set in a vaguely pagan world. Hysminias meets a girl who has the feminine form of his name, has a series of erotic dreams based on the paintings in her family’s home. She is about to be married but elopes with him. A storm comes up and the captain sacrifices her overboard. Hysminias and the others on board are captured by pirates and sold to a nobleman. This master decamps on a ritual mission to another town. Among the women slaves, one makes overtures to Hysminias – she is Hysmine, who was picked by a friendly dolphin. Everything ends happily.

Thematic core = sexual symmetry. Before 1st century CE, this theme (with a happy ending) seems to have been unknown. This was an invention of the first Greek novelists. In all Greek novels there is ingenuity, but also regularity. In Hysmine and Hysminias, the sexual symmetry carries over into the names of the protagonists. Widespread geography – four fictitious towns, indistinguishable. A knowing look backward at the fiction of antiquity. But, new features – greater sexual explicitness. Erotic devices through dreams. Subject experience – 1st person narrative. Refined sexual teasing. Uninteresting adventures of heroes – different from medieval chivalric romance.

Art of love makes an appearance in Hysmine and Hysminias. Wait for wedding night is frozen. First-person narrative not abandoned here. Prayer for immortality – to preserve the moment of consummation of love. But, this is not assured by the gods. Giving up on pagan gods, Hysminias says ‘Let our story be inscribed and be turned into rhetoric as an unperishable moment’.

Hysmine and Hysminias was copied frequently in the 15th and 16th centuries. Montemayor was inspired by it for his pastoral Diana (1559). D’Urfé may also have been inspired by it for his Astrée. 1617 – Paris, 1st printed edition of Hysmine and Hysminias. 18th century – French translation – pre-Revolutionary libertine circles.

Hysmine and Hysminias – simplified form of ancient Greek, like vulgar Latin. 1135–1155 – three other romances written in the same type of Greek by men attached to the court at Constantinople. They are written verse. Tendency to call them romances. Switch to verse never satisfactorily explained. Order of composition of these four novels not known. Theodore Prodromos, Rodanthe and Dosikles, c. 1135, but Eumathios Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias could have been earlier. Verse endured in Greek fiction. This period had no immediate sequel.

Mid to late 13th century – a revival of Greek fiction. Now, vernacular literature takes off in Greek. Five romances 1250–1400. Most influential is a translation of the French Roman de Troie. Livistros and Rodamni builds on the plot structure of the 12th century, but the marvelous is developed in Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe and Belthandros and Chrysantza. No knowledge of authors or intended audiences.

c. 1600 – Erotokritos by Vitsentzos Kornaros. Written in verse, in Cretan vernacular (developed under Venetian rule). Belongs to the intellectual world of the Italian Renaissance. Kornaros – an Italian name gone native. A Renaissance-style of work in five books. Like Arcadia. Not published until 18th century. With the Turkish conquest, literary culture on the island ended.

 

Nandini Das – ‘Romance and the Reinvention of Wonder in the Early Seventeenth Century’

Wonder lies at the heart of romance. But in the first decades of the 17th century, it comes under attack. The nature of fiction changes. There is an unstable relationship between fact and fiction. Don Quixote – 1605 & 1615 – difficult to read fiction in the same way as previously. But, wonder was not eliminated; it popped up in other ways.

Shelton’s translations of Quixote – 1612 & 1620.

Don Quixote, Part 2, Chapter 6 – chivalric tale – DQ points out the problems – Moors chasing an escaping couple in puppet show – chivalric romance. Cervantes’s narrative testifies that wonder has not been eliminated. DQ refuses to pay for puppet of heroine whose nose has been injured. The innkeeper wonders at DQ’s liberality more than his madness.

Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, remarked on the puppet show inside the novel. Early modern imagination stakes out ‘two continents of the mind’. Handling of this particular kind of wonder in romance points to a shift in the conceptualization of fiction in the early 17th century.

Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Wroth’s Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania – how fiction was read and used – neither at first glance offers any comment on DQ – but the wrinkles and flaws give a way to explore this. Wrinkles in these texts – unexpected. Hermione in Winter’s Tale – Shakespeare is toying with jealousy and aftermath.  Wroth’s Urania – second part includes discussion of stories from first part. Laments of the passing of time; the fears of losing love. Wrinkles = tiny invasive signs etched on the text of the heroines of romance. Often romance focuses on men. Wrinkles – separates present fiction from past fiction. Acknowledgement of this becomes a parody. Wroth – narrative wrinkles are both flaunted and challenged. Counter-move = improvisational magic – romance collapses under its own weight.

There is a reticence here – a refusing to dismantle the wonder of the old fiction completely.

Hermione – a return to the everyday – will demand an answer. A simultaneous displaying of unreality and preservation of it.

Don Quixote – early on, a scene where he makes a helmet out of paper pasted together. Whacks it with his sword, breaks it, but puts it back together. Satisfied with his invention and the solidity of his work. Mad logic protects artifice and invention. But, the helmet is not tested a second time. Like Hermione’s statue. None of these artefacts will be allowed to remain. Fictions of romance are delicate constructs, but they are necessary for the fiction that emerges.

Handling of romance – premise for construction of narrative causality. Facts of fiction rather than of the world beyond. What Cervantes and Wroth acknowledge textually. Seemingly bringing the statue of Hermione to life – leap of faith a necessary trial for Leontes. Change from fixation to the need for empirical proof. But, faith never really was necessary. Faith is not just the efficacy of theatre and romance. Stories can be told, retold, changed, and still invested with meaning and life. Fiction for a new age – self-conscious of its artifice and fragility. Separation of fiction and reality had come under attack.

 

Warren Boutcher – ‘Transnational Quixote? The Transmission of Truths and Lies via Print in Early Modern Europe’

Don Quixote – central to both strands (‘text’ & ‘transmission’) of this project.

I, chapter 46 – Discussion of books of chivalry. Don Quixote is put on a wagon by the barber. Meets up with the Canon of Toledo, who is filled in on the cause of DQ’s madness. Chapter 47 – the canon gives a lecture on how chivalric books are harmful. Cervantes – engaging an understanding of his readers to produce wonder and joy. Moments of affection for chivalric romance in DQ. Canon admits positive effects of chivalric romance. Analogous issues in stage plays. Censors in court – powers of approval – could approve books of chivalric romance.

How durable DQ’s imagination is. Canon asks whether these books could have made DQ believe these things. DQ – the Canon is enchanted. These books are accepted.

I, 50 – what is widely accepted and true? The way books are printed and approved that makes them true.

II, 62 – transmission – print shop – DQ begins conversation on translation – the translator in the print shop is gaining no more honour or fame than a scribe. Problem of how the author is to make a profit. Clash between chivalric romance and profit, related to narrative as a whole. DQ will find a continuation of his own adventures. Condemns piracy of text. Debased translations – exported books. Author – getting a fair deal with printer & bookseller? Books migrate that do not respect the original → introduction of false Quixote.

Theme of truth and lies – tied to the print trade, especially of chivalric romance. Wants to wean readers off chivalric romance. But, many hints that romances can be instructive as long as they are not debased.

Boundaries between fact/truth and fiction → larger questions at this time around print culture – How true is the book to the author’s text? Who should have authority to approve the authenticity of the book? How did conditions in print and publishing trade affect 1st and 2nd parts of DQ? How did transmission—the journey through many countries—shape the book?

I, chapter 6 – throwing out of DQ’s books by the priest – Mirror of Chivalry (Espejo de Caballerías) (Boiardo’s imitation of Ariosto) – whole Carolingian cycle is thrown out. Amadís – priest wants to burn it, but barber says that it’s unique. Censorship – 1540–80 – French & Italian book trade took over from Spanish. Amadís – 72 Spanish editions in the 16th century, 357 French, 85 Low Countries, 60 Italian. Continuations of Amadís in French and German.

Spanish book – a dialogue with censors. Priest reveals he is a friend of the author of Galatea. Paratext – approval of Quixote. Writing of Cervantes – good reception – decency and decorum – good reception in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Flanders. Cervantes’s international reputation – based on Galatea?

Transnational publishing scene shaped chivalric romance – Amadís as an example – easy migration and easy composition of continuations. Migration from Spain to France. De-hispanization. A unique Spanish set that could not be transformed, but transnational success was essential. A ready-made transnational route – through France. After 1605 – Spanish-French transmission. Celebrations of Elizabeth, daughter of James I to Palatinate. DQ begins his peroration in French.

Copied and continued lies – with censors – DQ could be a true, transmitted novel with a truly identified author.

 

Discussion

RC – Greek text – Hysmine and Hysminias – mediating steps in the West from Crusades to Italian tradition?

Rod B – Depends on ownership and provenance of manuscripts. Copied by known Italian humanists in 15th & 16th c, in original Greek. People copying in Greek are focussing on this text (12th-century romance), but not conscious of when it was actually written. Through book collectors there is an awareness of the West. Little known about the reception of medieval Greek novels.

GA – Boccaccio, a filter for Greek romances. Literary transmission – Boccaccio knew some Greek. Brings these texts into the Italian tradition and slings them back out. Contacts between Naples and Venice.

Rod B – Transmission – Boccaccio and Naples, also Venice (important – 1st Greek presses are in Venice). Contemporary Greek literature – printed in Venice. Things going in both directions. Boccaccio’s romances from the Neapolitan period play with Greed. He did learn Greek later but how much did he know about the contemporary Greek world? (Probably a lot.)

RB – connection between drama & fiction – whether something is true vs. whether you believe something is alive. Issue of embodied performance in a novel. Puppet shows – great targets for novelists. Fiction – new self-perception of itself. More belief of something on a page than on the stage?

WB – DQ – how performative the concept of fiction is. Not just words on the page.

ND – What is real vs. what is alive. DQ Part I – the knights are not perfect, but romances show them as they should be. DQ brings these knights alive through his own performance?

WB – End of DQ – he is not really DQ. He is alive when he is enchanted.

AS – DQ’s life ends when his story ends. His story is unrepeatable. Claim of authorship here. Novelistic writing – related to legal writing – state approval. But this ends with transnational transmission. Does romance become a retreat from the political? Cervantes doesn’t really want to destroy romance. A sense of romance being apolitical? Roman à clef – relationship between romance and reality.

ND – Wroth’s Urania – rooted in geopolitics of the period – reconfiguration of the idea of wonder but no destruction of wonder.

IM – Imitation/creation? Experimental philosophy – Bacon. A shift away from wonder?

ND – A big question. What happens to wonder in travel literature – importance of eyewitness evidence. How much emphasis on this is there in DQ?

WB – It doesn’t matter what Quixote sees.

RB – True in travel writing. Writer insists on his view and reinforces this with readings from romance.

HM – Hermeneutics of Amadís – what you’re looking at is not what you’re looking at. A counter-reality, not deception. Amadís is simply ‘other’. This is why DQ talks about enchanters. Wonder gains attraction because it is that way – doesn’t gain reality from deception. Where do we get the notion that DQ is anti-romance?

WB – Secondary literature wants DQ to be the first ‘realistic’ novel.

AS – The development of how DQ is read – it is the first novel. Depends on critical history.

HM – Spanish and American criticism going in the same direction? First English reading – about annotation/literary jokes/self-referential literary commentary. This drops out once the English novel arises with Fielding. We’ve forgotten how the English 17th century read DQ. England romanticizes Spain against Napoleonic France.

AS – Have we bought into Spain’s own propaganda of itself? Spain has always been seen as exotic.

 

Panel II

Brenda Hosington – ‘Fact and Fiction in Susan Du Verger’s Translations of Jean-Pierre Camus’ Relations morales, Evenements singuliers and Diotrephe

J-P Camus (1584–1652) – man of letters and of the cloth. Bishop in Savoy, retired to Cistercian abbey. Then went to Rouen and Paris. Appointed bishop of Arras, but died. Agent of Louis XIV in Catholic-Protestant quarrels. 223 titles in 44 years. Over 100 were mystical – influence of St Francis de Sales. Wrote novels and histories, too. 29 novels and 21 collections of stories. Created the religious novel. Before 1800, only 9 of his novels translated into English.

Susan du Verger – not much known about her. Wrote response to Duchess of Newcastle’s attack on monasticism. Lived in Paris. Well educated. Tradition says she was a member of the French Huguenot church in London, then became a Catholic and moved to Paris, then moved to Québec. Not probable! A connection with the Du Verger family in France? But, she was Catholic. Her translation was published by Harper, who is known for his Catholic works. False London imprint.

Diotrephe – J-P C’s novel – Valentinage = take a partner as a sweetheart for a period of time. Set in Savoy. A sex lottery. Adds characters and complex plot – morals of contemporary life. Overlapping views – secular and non-secular. Women = the true cause of ruin. Human actions – reason should dictate them. Can be learned by example. Overindulgence leads to corruption. Stories can act as a mirror reflecting vice and virtue. Written word has precedence over oral when moralizing. Real-life situation in novel. His story will be successful in mirroring ‘deformities’. Example is stronger than precept. Story set in factual framework.

Translation by Susan Du Verger – recent studies in translation → translation = ideological construction. Text = relevant to new readership. Shifts in treatment of paratext. Cultural translations. How S D V translates ‘true fiction’. In the court – romance → female agency. A translation must be seen in the context of other translations published at the same time.

Translations of titles are longer and with info on the author – this gives the translation authority.

Dedicatory epistle to Lady Herbert – LH was the 2nd wife of the eldest son of Earl of Worcester, daughter of Irish Earl, support of Catholicism. Catholic context of the Caroline world. S D V only partially translates Camus’ avant-propos. Omits negative comments on 17th-century French behaviour. General remarks retained.

Evenements singuliers – 70 stories. Religious/moral focus. Criticizes former authors of romance and short stories. True stories – no frivolous adventures. These do not encourage moral behaviour – especially the Italians. Wants to give testimony to the truth. Free of ridiculous ornaments. Abridgement of histories. Taken from real life, real situations. But settings and characters are fictional.

Preface to Relations morales – another collection of stories. Compares his stories to actual events. Certain truths, based on observable behaviour. Argues for objectivity. S D V’s translation – includes both collections (Evenements singuliers and Relations morales) – a selection of both together in one volume. Dedicatory epistle to Queen Henrietta Maria, ‘author to reader’, ‘translator to reader’. Hints at her own Catholic sympathies. Borrows Camus’ metaphor of mirror – what should be imitated. Stories = monuments of truth. Translates C’s preface faithfully. In the translator’s preface, she says that the epistle to Evenements should suffice.

How S D V transforms the work for an English-Catholic audience. The translations respect Camus’ views.

 

Helen Moore – ‘Francis Kirkman as Translator’

1652 – Francis Kirkman – two translations: Amadís and Loves and Adventures of Clerio and Lozia. Questions: What was happening to English romance in the Republic? What are the mechanics of translation?

Kirkman – autobiography, The Unlucky Citizen. Obsessive book. Not much studied.

Canonicity for 17th-century English romance? Kirkman is doing this for both drama and romance. But for romance, this is strictly a catalogue.

Salzman – outdated in saying that romance is political. What does this mean? Overuse of ‘political romance’.

Unlucky Citizen – autobiography, but also picaresque. Describes inclination to read books of knight-errantry as a child. Self-denigration and claim to fame. Habit of borrowing and lending books. Economic metaphors. School boys reading romance – this means that romance is not inherently female reading.

Amadís – removed in this period. Kirkman read 5 of 24 books. He’s picking up a lost tradition. A strong correlation between republishing pre-Restoration works and these romances. Hammering out = metaphor for translation.

Kirkman’s autobiography – example of how the roles of bookseller, publisher, and translator come together.

Paradigms of reading – exploiting the capital of the Quixotic reader.

English Rogue = rogue narrative. Counterfeit Lady = female rogue.

Theme of extravagance – counterfeiters, thieves, Quixotic reader, prodigal son. All of these → strong memory of knight-errant. Not used in a satirical way. Peninsular romance important. Heroic romance in collision with Peninsular fiction – goes back to 16th century. Peninsular fiction (extravagant) vs. ancient fiction (detailed). Divide between romance and novel – not at this time. Heroic romance vs. Peninsular romance.

Kirkman – technical expertise – auto-narrative of trauma. Print history – problems with his Amadís. Constant debt. Problems with purchase of paper.

Paratextual material for Amadís translation – Kirkman was not a Republican. Translation of romance post war – denigrates military events of past ten years. But, not an out-and-out Royalist. Bigger readership for romance than what had been thought.

Kirkman and French translation – tried to translate a dictionary. French contributes to his style. In Unlucky Citizen – coined new English words, ones he could not translate. A standard of English is emerging, but not fixed. Metaphorization of translation. A newly sophisticated feminine slant.

By 1650s – many similarities in French and English romance. But, Kirkman not interested in level of detail, in intricacies of arms as in French fiction. English romance – denigrated to reading of the middle class, stripped down from French romance. More significant military encounter in French.

 

Discussion

AE – Kirkman and Scudéry. Kirkman picks up on what people are saying about translation of Scudéry. Dates – Kirkman publishing these romances in the 1660s, Scudéry’s romances come out in the ‘50s, republished in the ‘70s.

HM – Aware of cultural capital. Kirkman drawn to Peninsular fiction but people say this is old fashioned. Wants to make money. Time has moved on. Scudéry – closer to Charles II’s court. Kirkman – interrupted translation.

WB – 17th-century clerics were heavily involved in not only censorship but also, in France & Italy, in the writing of fiction. Exception is in England.

BH – S D V – a Catholic writer, but also gives authority – ‘a prince of the Church’.

ND – Henrietta Maria – document that she and her women weren’t allowed to read. Sense of clerical intervention.

RB – How much French commentary written by clerics was translated into English?

BH – Problem because this has no context in English. Huet’s position in French criticism, for example. … Hammering – used quite often to represent translation. French medieval romance translated into middle English – a shift in class, as well, when works are translated. Less attention to courtly behaviour. Has to do with the fact that translation comes so much later than originals?

HM – English writers have no sense of the Spanish. A removed reading of Amadís.

 

Saturday, 3 May 2013

Panel III

Alexander Samson – ‘Fiction, Truth and History: Cervantes vs. Lope and Beyond’

Reformation – difference between doctrine & fable. Lies and truth are not a dialectic. Fiction complicates the matter. Lope de Vega – manifesto on art and The Feigned Truth. Explores metatheatre, relationship between life and fiction. Issue of religious conversion. Relationship between history and fiction.

Humanist rediscovery of comedy. Concept of folly – influences texts. Delicado Retrato de la Lozana – rise of subjectivity. Assimiliation of improper varieties of writing – picaresque.

Lazarillo de Tormes. Dialogue displays greater content of verisimilitude. Coherence. Half-way house between romance and novel. But, fifty years until next picaresque is written. Earliest representation of self in fiction? Lazarillo does this really interestingly. Inner/outer/cynical representation of introspection. Is it just a funny book or is it a social critique? It is all about comedy – not a proto-modern text as far as representative of self. Ironizing text.

Metafiction – not a Cervantine invention – already present here.

Cervantes’ Información de Argel – naïve empiricism. Relaciones – official approval. Official, juridical discourse. Inform and create legal record. Linked to rise of prose fiction through picaresque. Third-party witnesses called in.

Lope de Vega, Novelas a Marcia Leonarda – triple addressee. Olivares family. Framing device = courting. In dedication, ‘novellas’ = stories. Amadís – the father of the whole machine. Admission of Cervantes’ pre-eminence in the field of novella. But ought to be written by erudite men or great courtiers. Lope – different politics of prose fiction. Sees Cervantes as a populist, and himself as dignifying the novella through his erudition and experience as a poet. Lope = Baroque excess directed at multiple readership. Amplification. Differs from Cervantes – a response to Cervantes’ poetics.

Erudition vs. populism. Lope – didactic thrust. Claim to being elite.

Cervantes, Exemplary Novels – widely translated and imitated, stage adaptations. Influenced Fletcher’s plays. How these stories are framed in England. For refreshment and diversion. Licet pleasure. Address to the reader – to the Ladies – soft pieces of pleasure. Doesn’t take claims of exemplarity seriously.

What attracted Fletcher to Cervantine plots? Great leaps forward – but gaping chasms that separate these. Other models of prose fiction existed, but Cervantes has come to dominate literary history.

 

Ros Ballaster – ‘“Bring(ing) Forth Alive the Conceptions of the Brain”: From Stage to Page in the Transmission of French Fiction to the English Restoration Novel’

Congreve, Incognita – his only work of prose fiction – swapped identity – two couples. In preface, Congreve draws a distinction between romance and novel but his stress on drama is significant. Dramatic performance. A new life for the novel. The novel should seek affect of drama. A capacity to communicate life in a story.

Rise of the novel in England – has to do with stage fiction in Restoration England. French prose fiction is imitated. Taking of female parts by women. Libertinism.

Prose fiction of the late 17th century – penned by authors writing for the stage.

Distinction between mental and visual perception. Fiction is defined by attitude to affect. Consumer-driven by affect.

Three forms owing debt to France: novel of consciousness; novel of adventure; comic romance. Attention to performance in these. But, access to psychological aspects of character not available in drama.

Aphra Benn – intelligent experimenter in prose fiction as influenced by France.

Lafayette – fiction of consciousness. Companion of La Rochefoucauld. Also advanced by Aphra Benn. Elegant concision of Lafayette’s prose – focalized through female protagonist. Three English writers took the bait: Aphra Benn, Mary Pix, Richard Blackbourn. Reflection of the process of thinking in their novels.

Benn, History of the Nun – one of the most sophisticated in this period.

Mary Pix, Inhumane Cardinal – set in the Vatican. Psychological concentration – tension & decision for central protagonist. Focus also on intrigue. Innocence of heroines.

Anti-romance – Villedieu, ‘nouvelles galantes’ – English translation – same concern as original about use of 1st– or 3rd– person narration. Self-incrimination of narrator – first part in 1st person, second part in 3rd person. A woman’s narrating of her past → precursor to Moll Flanders.

Alexander Oldys, Fair Extravagant and Female Gallant – brings intrigue to his fiction. Real world of coffee houses of London in Fair Extravagant. Female Gallant – a mix of picaresque and romance.

Aphra Benn – interiority and intensity. Mature, confident narrator.

Scarron, Roman comique imitated by Benn. Scarron = anti-romantic. Congreve, Incognita – metaphor of dress. Pun – text & textile work.

French influences – pervasive in late 17th-century English prose fiction. Short, playful, urbane style. Also, engaging with experience of London theatre – important. Traslations and imitations adapted to the expectations of English audiences.

 

Discussion

NH – 3rd person from 1st person – why is this particularly English?

RB – Novel is incomplete. Odd textual conundrum. Hazard of print market in England. Second part read with no knowledge of first? Note that Pamela comes across with more sexual knowing than perhaps Richardson wanted. Romance for women normally in 3rd person. But for ‘adventure and jilt’, 1st person is needed.

AD – In drama of this period, are soliloquies regarded as unartistic?

RB – Yes. Drama of this period is self-consciously engaging with its audience.

AD – Novel charts transitions of feeling where drama can’t. Fiction of interiority.

WB – ‘novelar’ – a verb in Spanish. Widely used? How to translate? Do other languages have this?

AS – Cervantes may be the first person to use this.

GA – Exists in Boccaccio = ‘to tell a story’.

WB – Spain – a very sophisticated literary criticism about novels and the writing of novels. Nothing quite like it elsewhere.

AS – Why the Spanish novel is so great. This exists already in Lazarillo.

RB – Tristam Shandy – Cervantes is everywhere. Multiple readership. A debate about rhetoric. Problematic?

AS – Metafictionality. Cervantes – tempts you into reading into the author function. Lope inserts himself clearly.

RB – Writing persona of novel – inaccessible to women in the 17th and 18th centuries?

AS – Fletcher found a lot of salacious material in Cervantes.

ND – In England, in 16th century, William Baldwin – same questioning, self-aware questioning, but nobody takes this up?

AS – Authority changes in England?

ND – Has to do with awareness of print and textuality.

RB – Oldys has some of this. Jokes, witty.

WB – Big picture – relationship between drama and fiction. How does this change from 16th to 17th century in England? In James’ court – connection between books read in court and what turns up in plays. So, this is in place in the culture already.

RB – But, later in the 17th century, the experience of reading and seeing drama now being set against each other. Market competition. Question of what a living character is – a novel can make a person more alive than drama.

 

Panel IV

Jacqueline Glomski – ‘Politics and Passion: Fact and Fiction in Barclay’s Argenis

Scholars – mostly satisfied with the statement that Barclay mixed contemporary political and religious debate with late-antique romance – only superficial comments on how B combined early seventeenth-century politics and fiction. But, examination of Argenis at the levels of characterization, plot construction, and narration reveals how Barclay integrated fact and fiction – how he expanded the notions of romance to create a new form of fiction.

Argenis = a romance influenced by the writing of the late-antique author Heliodorus. Barclay’s novel – prominent ideological content – an important project of its author, then a mature writer. Barclay inserted discourses on contemporary issues in the form of dialogues in each book. Allegorical dimension – a king’s excessive mildness will lead to rebellion and civil war.

17th-century readers of Argenis would have expected the novel’s characters to represent historical personages, but Barclay did not intend to write a veiled history of contemporary Europe. B wanted to convey ideas through a fictional story. Did not merely interject political dialogues into a romantic plot; rather, he integrated factual politics and fictional romance so that the characters of the novel live out their politics within the frame of a love story.

Barclay used his characters and his plot structure, and even his narrator effectively to communicate his message to his audience. Extended conversations – integrated into the story – characters act out the convictions they express in them. Action and dialogue in the Argenis reflect each other. A clever twist – B writes himself into the story as a minor character, Nicopompus, a courtier in King Melander’s entourage – participates in the court dialogues, with significant contributions during the discussions pertaining to culture and to literature. The novel’s form – Barclay ‘contaminates’ the story line of the Aithiopika with elements of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia – abandons the ‘journey’ framework of traditional late-antique romance. A portrait of life at the court – atmosphere full of duplicity, disguise, and paranoia. Narrator compounds the intrigue – ambiguous attitude towards the interpretation of events in the novel.

 

Alice Eardley – ‘Great Profit, Glory, and Fame: Fact, Fiction, and the Publication of French Romance in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’

Melle de Scudéry novels in fashion in the 50s→ Manuscripts, letters testifying interest of readers.

Melle de Scudéry in England – reception studies. So far, two strands in Anglo-American criticism.

Royalist romance context – royalists writing romances during civil wars

The rise of the novel → form of realism.

Translations and French version are all put together whereas they are two sets of texts which need to be considered differently. Cultural status of these translations as they are brought out in the 1650s in England. Steady stream of Scudéry fiction. Translators – image of leisured gentleman. But, this was commercialism – Moseley, publisher. Translators working at considerable speed. Fostering and supplying a wider taste for fashionable works.

Davis, Factual fictions – about readers of these romances: wealthy, aristocratic; Cf. prefaces et peritext – readership targeted

Don’t take preface material too seriously… lots of topoi… impetus to publish novels. Developing commercial argument. Fame and money through publication. Author’s presentation of himself as a learned amateur  = topos.

Highly topical material.

Question: which kind of readers? Cf. publishers and translations.

Popularity of the French novels. Marketable commodity → Amadís stuff is out of fashion; historically based fictions are seen as new and salable, cf. Scudéry.

Actual readership broader than projected readership.

Frontispieces: commercial context, very rapidly published. For a decade, fairly concerted commercial enterprise. Cf. Moseley: publisher of literary material mostly. Strong connections with Royal community. Interest in French fictions can be explained through this connection. But rather than political motives, commercial motives. Market for romance literature. Advertisements in other publications – targeted readership.

Names of the translators: Hendy Cogan; F G Gent; G H; John Davies – all of these men had a career as translators (or at least some kind of decent living). They worked at considerable speed and to order. Quality of translation was in question: they were notoriously bad.

Number of people involved: to meet the demand of the market.

Much broader taste – including lower class of readers, modest backgrounds (not just elite group of people just coming back from France).

Evidence: actual readership – genuine popular status of such romance. A phenomenon – much more complex relationship with the culture of the elite.

 

Discussion

AS – Coterie readership; myth of elite readership = marketing.

Others – Robert Boyle had an interest in romances.

Length: you are constantly in the expectation.

Male/female reading – names in the copies – they are read on desks (blotches of ink). Folio format – women reading in beds, without pens nearby.

Names and keys; political reading?

Geographical reach of the novel – Latin (→ Europe); huge numbers of editions and translations

 

Conclusion (IM)

What we won’t do: a sort of general survey of prose fiction in Europe; nor a narrative of the rise of the novel, with picks (big names, etc.)

Having said that, I was quite struck by the fact that there is clearly a fruitful dialogue between French, Spanish and English traditions; and I hope with Italian too. Don Quixote in particular, as WB said, seems to be an essential figure in transmission when we come to question this fact/fiction stuff.

So no comprehensive survey: More a mapping of issues, that we argue are better understood or perceived in a comparative framework

1st remark: Terminology shifts around – very fluid. The word novel just does not cut that through. In the first workshop, instability of 17th-century fiction as a genre was made obvious by looking at its margins: so we came up with the notions of hybridity and flexibility in the fusing of fiction and non-fictional material. Permeable boundaries between genres – including genres we would not consider as of a literary nature.

So, how do we define 17th-century prose fiction? RB has just suggested that fiction should be defined by different attitudes towards affect and reflection (rather than by its difference from fact, truth etc.)

There is also the old opposition between fancy tales, wonder, lies /truth. Fiction complicates all those categories. ‘We have a rule to judge doctrine by, whereby we may say this or that doctrine is false & a lye. But in stories we have not so’.

I would argue for a third way of defining it. AS – writing novels/incredibly sophisticated literary criticism about the novel in Spain; but same in France really – more broadly – the notion of self-consciousness – when you look at the text as something which is experimenting with its form by playing with what it is not, or does not want to be anymore.

Prose fiction – a performative concept, rather than a stable category?

Cf. Nandini – Wrinkles in the textual body and reluctance to completely get rid of wonder (or older models of fiction) – old tales inherited by the 17th century – old stories reinvested and changed – it pops back in other forms. Self-conscious in its artifice and in the fragility of its artifice. And that’s why transmission, translation are important.

Looking through different eyes – the importance of translation, transmission – displacement which reveals hidden or less hidden issues; it is also an insight into reading trends of the public – to translate books – to reorder the social space that produces them.

Last workshop – attention to the reader seems here quite important here – question of the reader – forest of varied reading. Is it reading that creates fiction? What does the translator, who is the first reader, bring to the text? Readers have a whole range of sources/traditions that we have to take into account when analyzing those shifts /conceptualization of fiction. May be a shift in the understanding of invention (less imitation than creation)?

 

Discussion

RB – A preoccupation with prose – is it a meaningful deliberator in this period? Why are we confining ourselves to prose fiction?

IM – There is a shift at this point.

ND – Do we have to justify this?

IM – Does not fit into fixed categories.

RB – Prose – lack of formal expectation – fit for experimentation

IM – Expectations of readership are changing. 17th-century prose – it becomes something identified; by the end of the century, people will make those distinctions. Progress towards categorical stability = formal expectations.

ND – Hybridity and idea of mise en page. Once there is a block of text of prose on the page, it triggers a hybridity. A block of verse is much more easily identified.

AS – When does prose become an exclusive category?

WB – 1657—bookseller’s catalogue divides romances as a separate category.

AD – 17th-century prose becomes identified as a distinctive category.

RC – In mid to late 16th century, this emerges. Scaliger, etc. Use of prose to ‘display’ verse, but the prose takes over. Is the 17th century a time when the flexibilities solidify?

AE & RB – The poetry gets taken out in the translations of longer prose fiction with lines of poetry inserted.

HM – A codification of Scaliger’s view of Heliodorus?

RB – Categorical stability – an interesting concept.

ND – A formal expectation.

 

 

Workshop 1 – Notes

By Isabelle M M Moreau, on 15 January 2013

British Academy Project

Seventeenth-Century: Text and Transmission

Workshop 1 – Notes (taken by J. Glomski)

Friday, 12 Oct 2012

Panel I

Isabelle Moreau – ‘Novels in Charles Sorel’s Bibliothèque françoise

Sorel – genre classification – subgenre – an insight into reading trends of the public – to classify books – to reorder the social space that produces them – his method was groundbreaking – the books he thinks are worth reading.

French or translated into French – national framework. Belles lettres emphasis. Reflects book market production. Women authors. Organization of material – minor genres – fashionable in salons – pragmatic – what is sold & read.

Literary achievement – French novels have surpassed other nations. Connection – fiction & history. True narrations vs. fictional narrative. Both sections organized the same.

History/fiction. History – authorial pact. Fiction – made up, no matter how probable the story can be. System or representation mediated by use of convention. Narrative fiction – polite society. Romans comiques. Criterion of vraisemblable. Satire – linked to using people – vices & faults. Tradition of obscene writing at beginning of 17th c. Cyrano’s novels compared to Kepler’s Somnium. Fiction – can deliver non-fictional (scientific) content.

Readers & critics – evolution nuanced. Relation between fiction & scientific truth.

 

Robert Carver – ‘Seventeenth-Century Fiction and the Ancient Novel’

Golden Ass – epic archetypes. Ancient novel – more interest recently. Ian Watt – demonstrably false, but ‘easy to use’. Working definition – narrow. McKeon – pushed back boundaries to 17th c., but earlier works mentioned only in passing. 1990—Paul Hunter – objected to extension of definition of the novel. 1996—Doody – enormous undertaking. Solutions – to collapse distinction into identities.

Epic, romance, novel – ‘epos’? But novel never succumbs to epic. Fielding – comic-epic, poem in prose. Myth of the novel – allows Doody to make connections. Small detail – subsumed into larger narrative? But reaction to Doody’s book – negative. But, used to teach – on the syllabus. A new starting point, though.

We cannot abandon empiricism or myth. What mode are we working in? Morphology does not equal fiction. Distinctions made by critics/authors in the past. Emphasize continuity over discontinuity – no! There are breaks in tradition. Loss of novel in early Middle Ages.

1420s – Petronius discovered, then lost until 1660s. Golden Ass – sleeps, but Alexander Romance continues. Generic affinity – connection between modern novel and ancient texts. Not a straightforward journey.

Cervantes – Don Quixote – first modern novel, reflective. Discursive method. Self-conscious humour. Discussions on the nature of fictions. Canon of Toledo – Milesian Tales (not much known) – Apuleius. These tales may be joined. Cupid & Psyche – mystical tale could be Milesian.

Vives – lumps chivalric & Milesian together. Ascham – support for banishing romance & Milesian tales. Macrobius – Apuleius wasted his time. Northern humanists – Menippean, Lucianic – Erasmus, Thomas More – satyra (mixed ingredients) – up to 1620s – Burton, then Sterne. Turning point – 1561, Scaliger’s PoeticaAethiopica (1547, French; 1552, Latin) – highest accolades.

Sydney’s Arcadia – 1st humanist novel – acceptable uses of fiction. Move from Old to New Arcadia – ‘Aethiopicizes’ his work. But, failure to complete.

Cervantes – Novelas, then competes with Aethiopica in Persiles. More Milesian than Heliodorian in Novelas. Variable & fanstastical. Blend of Apuleius & Petronius? Jeremy Taylor – Petronian examples.

Sorel – Extravagant Shepherd – highly explicit allusions to ancient novels. In medias res convention. Oration against poetry, fables, romances. Not just calling upon ancient novels, but asking for meditation on the nature of fiction.

Discussion

HM – But classical romances are not novels. Tim Whitmarsh, Simon Goldhill involved in this debate.

RC – 1989, conference on the ancient novel. Question of getting funding. Petronius & Apuleius = novels. Heliodorus, no. Greek romances highly sophisticated. Petronius & Apuleius – better than what we get until extremely late.

ND – Relationship between morphology & filiation.

RC – What was known or simply that humans write certain narratives as a response to certain situations? Vives – Macrobius adapted for 16th c. What people are writing is sophisticated.

WB – Is Sorel an apologist for the book market?

IM – To counter criticism, Sorel says, ‘Look what’s selling’.

AS – Book market, explosion of longer prose fiction in the 17th c. – More profitable to be a dramatist. The value of different genres?

RC – 1580s & 90s in England – pamphlets – getting something out quickly. Then, Heliodorian impulse.

RB – History of the book: stories & patterns – narrative archetypes → history of the book helps to unknot this. What’s current? What are we calling a ‘text’? How do we define it?

GA – Look at the material objects. Look at format & size → genre & transmission.

ND – Socialibility – Dorothy Osborne.

HM – ‘appetite’ – inflected differently. Organizing fiction by consumption of genre. Romance vs. novel.

 

Panel II

Alex Davis – ‘“Key, Cabinet, Cloth”: Historical Ficiton and its Metaphors in the Seventeenth Century’

1671 – old-style chivralric romances – scarce, but not worth printing – new texts, romances → Cloria, Clavia. Allegory.

16th-century romances – always contained contemporary references. 17th-century – codes, keys, allusions. Argenis (Barclay), Loose Fantasies (Digby).

Princess Cloria – preface – methodical coherence in story & transactions that have passed. Narrative mode – small repertoire of metaphors. Relationship between text & outside, like a cabinet. Texts to be deciphered. Doesn’t convince us that this literature is interesting. The antithesis of intellectual literature. How to rescue 17th-century romance fiction from this.

17th-century roman à clef ← end of 16th c historical fiction. These 17th-c works = historical fiction. Classical, pagan setting. Not tied to any specific time period. Adventure & love. But some sort of interest in historicity at work. Positioning of history within the text. Inside/outside opposition. Possible distinctions – contemporary/historical; fact/fiction; exemplarity/specificity. Provocative engagement of these oppositions. Not found in 16th-c fictions. Changing character of historical inquiry, attitudes toward fiction.

Idea of concealment opens up conversation about these topics. New ways of engaging readers through literary bifurcation. Narrative paratexts → historical representation.

Metaphor of clothing/disguise – Barclay, Argenis, Book 2 – Nicopompus wants to speak out, but not directly. Disguise – clothing, history. Fabric metaphor. Wroth, Urania. Narrative & historical representation. Historical fetishism. Dress up the text. What is the significance of classicizing garb? Multiple readings – desire & resistance. Displaced sexual interest. Uncover the body under? Clothing & exposure. Engagement with the past – at the centre of the narrative.

 

Nick Hammond – ‘Gossip narratives in Lafayette’s  La Princesse de Clèves

Gossip in 17th-c France. Exploration of the margins – not legally published works. But could not ignore Princesse de Clèves – narrative & gossip entwined. Elements of gossip – important in 17th c.

Princesse de Clèves – first modern novel. Everything (subgenres) come together here. Protean implications of gossip as a mode. Voices populating the text. Gender issues – where does fiction spring from? Purveying gossip. Semiotics of gossip.

Gossip → oppositions. Gossip vs. rumour. Gossip – delighted construction of a narrative.

Gossip vs. conversation in 17th-c France. The art of conversation, correct modes of speaking. Gossip crosses rigid boundaries – informal. Conversation – aristocratic, but gossip crosses class boundaries.

Written vs. oral gossip. Gossip vs. silence. The need to keep silent.

Public vs. private. Exact definitions. Gossip’s power of transformation.

Semiotics of gossip & Princesse de Clèves – deciphering – historical fiction – courtly setting – when she withdraws, the story ends – we learn about 16th-c kings. 1st half – digressions – historical lessons? – moral tales to educate the princess – but also gossip narratives. Gossip entwined with the text. Primary epistemological tool – complex web of intrigue & scandal. Princesse de Clèves admission that she is in love with another man (who is hiding and listening in).

Gossip as imitation & replication. Gossip associated with letter-writing.

Boileau – Art poétique – ancients – dismissive of romance – frivolous. Tout s’excuse – dangers of gossip, but also possibilities.

 

Discussion

AD – Influence of Sidney, Argenis, roman héroïque.

RB – Roman à clef – secret history – a real secret can’t be portrayed.

ND – Urania can’t be decoded.

AD – Real people shadowed in the text. More independent fictional interest. Narratives produce further narratives.

ND – Urania plays on readers’ assumptions of decoding.

AE – How many people in England could decode a translation of a French text? Titillation of something lying underneath.

AD – Gossip – a good way of thinking about these texts.

RB – You can only have a correspondence when you have a separateness.

NH – Commonplace of fiction: this is a true tale. Gossip starts – construction of tale becomes as enjoyable as the story. Creative act – written vs. spoken.

F A-T – A question of scale – the micro-story expands.

NH – Good idea – how a story expands.

HM – Is gossip implied to be wrong? Is gossip untruth?

NH – Depends. Enjoyment of stories without any political purpose.

ND – Pleasure is associated with gossip.

AS – Gossip is a social glue → community.

NH – But it excludes those outside.

AS – Decipherment creates community.

NH – Princesse de Clèves was included in gossip before it was published.

 

Saturday, 13 Oct 2012

Panel III

Thibaut Maus de Rolley – ‘Based upon a true story: Demonology, fictions and legal archives in France’

Flight & aerial voyages – demons & witches – capacity of devil to fly through the air – uses of narrative elements – dialogue between Early Modern demonology & geographic knowledge.

How demon texts relate to literature of crime. Legal writings, exorcisms, depositions. Histories and discourses. Based in legalities – court orders. Histoires tragiques. Fictionality – distinction between true and false. When does a legal text turn into a story?

T’s project: Selection of documents – cases of witchcraft – Louys Gaufridi affair (1611, Aix) – priest burnt at stake for witchcraft. Nuns had accused him. Text of confession published. Torture & imprisonment. Voice of accused distorted. Text appears in different versions/natures. 1614 – confession used to build a story. 1623 – included in Le Normant’s Histoire, faithful to first version.

LG’s bio – read as a magician’s life. Evokes life of Faust – also pamphlets of the time, demonological commentaries.

Question – transmission of figure of Faust from fiction to legal archive. Like Faust, LG commits to die at the end of the contract. Variations:  Faust, magician, never ceases to be haunted by death. This is not found in confessional documents. The voice of the condemned is not heard.

Key of narrative: narrative of death not recounted in 1611 report. Magician’s death kept out. Ends with proclamation of law. Function of death is to validate the previous narrative – legitimizes. A much more dreadful death is implied. Proof that nuns & demons are telling the truth. 1614 version = less – or more – fictional than Faust. How were these reports received by Early Modern readers? (Fact or fiction?)

 

Frédérique Aït-Touati – ‘Fiction and knowledge in astronomical texts’

Fictions of the cosmos, fictions/anecdotes – use of fiction in unexpected situations. Fiction = a tool that is borrowed from the literary field. Lunar voyages mix knowledge & fiction. A combination of the two discourses.

2 reasons for using fiction in scientific/philosophical context: 1) narrative fiction = metaphor for search for knowledge; 2) strategy of dissimulation.

Kepler, 1610 – heliocentrism not condemned yet by Church. Huygens – Copernicanism was ‘orthodox’ by this time. Kepler doesn’t try to hide; neither does Huygens.

So, fiction was used to establish the truth of the new cosmology. Fiction as a thought experiment. A way to see further. Kepler – the lunar tale takes us into space. Fiction provides an image that is lacking (something that cannot yet be demonstrated mathematically). Visualization. Fiction develops a line of argumentation. Moon – different, but still can be described. Kepler mingles poetic techniques & astronomical description. New scientific use of fiction. Confirms the use of fable for imparting knowledge – previously knowledge ‘hidden’ in the fable. Here, dramatizes his hypotheses. Sending a human body into space & a view of earth from space.

Fiction as a hypothesis – Fontenelle – plurality of worlds. Representation as in microfiction. To use fiction in a ‘black hole’. Shift from geography to choreography results in fiction.

Relationship between fiction & art (besides scientific instruments). Fiction creates images where the eye is incapable. In Fontenelle the relationship doesn’t really work. Remains at the level of hypothesis. Fiction helps to understand, but not really hypothesize. Descartes’ long chains of reasoning become long chains of imagination. An act of pleasure – imagination & entertainment. Pleasure & philosophical invention – from Descartes.

No one single way to articulate fiction & knowledge – different uses.

While fiction was gaining currency for revealing knowledge, ‘fiction’ gains a bad reputation = lies. Fiction becomes the ‘other’ of science. Cognitive use of fiction and criticism of fiction as a lie. Cosmological debate vacillates between fact and fiction. Unstable epistemological place. Cosmological debate between the time of Kepler and that of Newton. Fictive register = falsehood. Various meanings behind fiction. Fiction as a possibility. After Kepler – bringing together of heterogeneous elements. Astronomical texts shed light on problematics of term ‘fiction’.

Ambition and scale of fiction. Uses of fiction – relationship to sciences & other fields.

 

Discussion

AE – Use of fact in fiction. How to distinguish between the two? Textual way? Marketing? Use of word ‘knowledge’?

F A-T – Knowledge = astronomical knowledge. Kepler = fable & footnotes. Cyrano – link bet fiction & knowledge – does the fiction take over knowledge? Fontenelle – up to the reader to find the knowledge.

AE – History & cosmology – some similarity.

F A-T – No strict break. Fictionalizing texts. Factualizing texts.

NH – Introduction of newspapers – discussions of scientific issues, but done in a fictional way.

T MdeR – pamphlets. Fact & fiction come together.

F A-T – In everyday publications, fact & fiction already mixed.

AG – An elaboration on one subject – broadsheets, then brought together in newspapers. So, not yet a breakdown of fact & fiction.

*AD – Overall project of our group: Is fiction at this time a stable category?

T MdeR – Pieces of narrative in demonological treatises – how were they perceived? Either it’s a lie or a truth?

AD – 16th-century fiction is more humanistic/rhetorical, an issue of persuasion.

T MdeR – Demonology makes a distinction between true & false.

RC – Demonology tracts – jurists – feedback loop reinforcing each other.

ND – Nature of truth vs. fact – witnessing truth may be fact, but not the other way around.

RB – Place of women – manipulation of figure of female as vulnerable, not knowledgeable. Fiction as seductive. Female as undiscerning consumer. Teaching the reader to be discerning.

T MdeR – Narratives can turn a reader into a witch. Playing the devil’s game. Seeming truth gives these stories their attraction.

Panel IV

Jon Bradbury – ‘Miscellaneous Literatures: Prose Fiction in the Spanish Miscelánea’

Spanish miscellanies – intentions underpinning this genre. Novelas incorporating poetry. Spanish prose miscellany – tradition not wholly understood.

Baroque miscellany originator, Pedro Mexía—Silva, 1540. Varied reading – variety – discontinued nature of text. ‘altibajo’. Classical source. Fantastical but with authorities. Erudition.

Diego de Arce – Ecclesiastical miscellany (competing with secular miscellany). Studies – poets, orators.

Mexía – lower brow, but commonality with classics (Gellius, Poliziano, etc.). Explicitly fictional material not included. Development into dialogue form. Torquemada.

17th century – different picture. 1602 – Diego Dávalos y Figueroa, Southern Miscellany. Dialogue between author & wife.

Literary materials included grow during the 17th c. 1673 – Sánchez Tórtoles, El Entretenido – little erudite material. The last miscellany.

Spanish miscellany – overt transmission of erudition. Peak in 17th c – learning & literary materials – 1632, Montalbán, Para todos (1684 into French; 1710 into English). Frame story. Double wedding. Variation on Decameron? Not relevant. Looks to the miscellany of antiquity. Contrasts limitations of theatre vs. miscellany (something for everybody). Three novelas in this, which in turn contain poetic insertions. Novela cortesana – the frame. Misidentification, intrigue. Robbers & criminals. Light picaresque. Moral message not ambiguous here. Some comic relief. Working around the 1625 ban on publishing this genre – decline of morals in Castille (novelas & comedias). Culmination of trend of first 3 decades of the century.

Figueroa and Lobo – prose fiction not dominant. Nor is prose fiction innovative. But deal with literary theory. Both treat the short story (Poliziano). Lobo tackles the method of telling ‘historias’ in conversation. Treats with great care characters, story, joy of happy ending. Neo-Platonic literary theory. A well-rounded man should be able to recount these stories in company. Tradition – but substantial difference with ‘cuentos’. Examples of ‘historia’ given as well as ‘cuento’. Figueroa defines term ‘novela’. Traces it back to more simple type of fiction. But novella is now a written form. What leads one to reason prudently – maxims, advice.

Flexibility of form as far as extension.

Cervantes – claims that his the first to have written novelas in Spanish.

Tirso – assures reader that his novelas have not been stolen from the Tuscan.

Picaresque not in good shape in early 17th-c Spain.

Figueroa – from Boccaccio. Diversity – ‘forest of varied reading’ – novelas, proverbial touchstone.

Miscellany & novelas fit together.

Guyda Armstrong – ‘Beyond the Boccaccian novella: the transmission and translation of Italian(ate) prose fiction’ in the seventeenth century’

Beyond the Boccacian novella. Truth & fiction of translation. Monograph on Boccaccio in English translation, 15th to 20th c. Reception study, with history of the book, etc.

Not an influence study. Writing Boccaccio back into the English context. Looks at source & targets book objects. Always reframing the source material – physically – for the receiving culture. What’s translated, left out. Mise-en-page. Transmission of Boccaccio’s texts. B’s presence in translation – huge. All of Western vernacular. B did more than the Decameron. Invented verse epic (ottavo), Il Filostrato, Trojan chivalric romances. Move freely across the continent, but little of his output actually goes into English.

Fiammetta – first psychological novel? Ovid, Heroides. Avidly consumed in Spain. Woven into prose romances.

Flossolan – trans into German & French.  Decameron – into German & French by 1500. But into English only in 1620 – belated.

Trajectories & points of intersection. Book object – produced at a certain time/place, but captures temporalities.

Discussion of title-page of 1620 English translation – What’s the source? French (1545)? Salviati’s edition of 1582? Who’s the translator? Title-page woodcuts – large format. Language & censorship. Other English translations – similar complicated histories. Binding together of B with other texts.

How B circulates independently. Griselda. Fate, dissemination of B – transmission/adaptation/notions of genre/history – novella. How do these tales travel independently? How is B’s Decameron understood in the context of 17th-c fiction, and on the macro- micro level? Influence of French conte. Intertwining of traditions provoked by print.

Italianate tales – still a category in the 17th c? Italian novella in English literary culture. Monumental publishing history of Decameron.

 

Discussion

RB – Story isn’t central to miscellanies – but, novella, sequence – important in 17th c. Nova Atlantis – framed, presented as Italian framed sequence. Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel (1999) – legal discourse. Keep this genre in mind. Arabian nights, fairy tales.

GA – Makes it licet for women to appear. Structural models.

RB – Sequence – demonstrating a moral. But can the structure contain the tale?

AD – Title-page – a frame. Same scene repeated – border motifs.

 

Conclusion

IM – We started from what is a novel – to a comprehensiveness – difficulty of tracing boundaries – relation of fiction to other fields – fusing of fiction & non-fictional devices – erudition, science, legal texts. Idea of hybridity, mixture. Borrowings & transformations, at the same time as when fiction is trying to define itself. Question of the reader – forest of varied reading. Is it reading that creates fiction?

RB – What does the reader bring to the text? Readers have a whole range of sources/traditions.

ND – Attention to the reader. Relating fact & fiction. Boundaries between history & fiction. What’s special about 17th-century fiction? Attention to readers is important.

AG – Fact/fiction – what did readers make of this? A moment in the development of a genre. Where is it at that moment? The ‘reader’ can be helpful here.

NH – Reading practices. Aloud & silent reading.

RB – Teleology? Is the novel more of an accident than we think?

AD – Novel might not be the endpoint. What about scientific revolution? Big narratives. 17th-c fictions produce classifications more easily than 16th c. In 17th c people get interested in systematizing. Self-consciousness.

F A-T – Do we start from noting occurrences of the word ‘fiction’?

AG – Is this imposing a term of ours? What is truth in the 17th c? Is there such an opposition in the 17th c?

RB – What’s the status of prose in this period? Is there no reason why fiction shouldn’t appear in other genres? The status of prose in this period is experimental. Prose is less defined.

AE – The market – who’s reading and why. Who’s making the decisions?

RB – Is prose easier to typeset?

AG – Aesthetics of the book – important.

AD – Title-page, again. The importance of Boccaccio as a prose writer.

GA – Transmission. Is English trying to do the same as Italian?

RC – Important to notice how late Boccaccio comes into English.

ND – The English Boccaccio is a different brand.

GA – More popular reception in England.

RB – Numbers (on title-page) important (‘a hundred pleasant novels’). Indicate that there is something for everybody. Micro-text & macro-text.

 

 

Academic programme

By Isabelle M M Moreau, on 15 January 2013

Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission 

A research project funded by the British Academy

The novel has become a news item. In the past few years, discussion of fiction in all forms of media has intensified. The prominence of literary critics has increased, the awarding of lucrative book prizes has become more publicized, and reports of the formation of reading groups have proliferated. Yet, there is no comprehensive history of early modern fiction to respond to the present popular interest in the novel. Until recently, most studies of the rise of the novel have taken a narrow approach, either starting their history only with the eighteenth century and/or working within the boundaries of a single national literature. Furthermore, scholars have tended to adhere to a limited definition of the novelistic form, one that has placed importance on ‘progress’ in the history of literature and associated the notion of realism with modernity. While the first approach obscures the interchange between different languages and geographical regions that was integral to the formation of genres as one national literary output came into contact with another, the second approach excludes many texts that contributed to the tradition of fiction-making, especially texts written by and for women.

Paul Salzman’s ground-breaking English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700 (Oxford, 1985) took an initial step in considering together the Continental influences on early English fiction and the role played by women’s writing therein, but it was not until the volume edited by Jenny Mander, Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (Oxford, 2007), that a group of scholars called for a more adequate understanding of the early history of the novel. Mander and her colleagues proposed an analysis that would include the types of narrative that commanded the largest readership—a transnational and female readership—in the early modern period, that is, a new, comprehensive outlook with a comparative framework that would trace continuities in novelistic production across time and national boundaries.

Because the novel and critical discussions of the novel are so prominent in the public sphere and because previous histories of the novel are being called into question by academics, now is an important moment to focus on early fiction—especially seventeenth-century fiction, which contains the bases of all the genres we read today. Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission brings together UK academics from disciplines that do not usually collaborate in order to concentrate on a defined set of topics (see below) that, taking into account the present shift in critical theory from historicism to historical formalism, starts from the literary text and works outwards to examine the social, cultural, and historical aspects of text. This group takes up where Mander’s project left off: it aims at European comprehensiveness (English, French, Spanish, Italian, Neo-Latin, Byzantine), but while Mander’s project leaned more towards the eighteenth century, our group focuses on the seventeenth century with the intention of uncovering the deeper roots of the transnational exchanges that led to the development of new forms of fiction. In planned workshops, participants examine the changes in prose forms and in their usage at a critical point in the history of modern fiction; our goal is to produce a landmark volume that will contribute to a more comprehensive history of the early novel.

 

Topics

Text

  • What narrative structures/genres/styles are prevalent in prose fiction at this time?
  • What are the different offshoots (subgenres) of these?
  • How are genres/styles transmitted from country to country?
  • What is the relationship of fiction to other genres (poetry, drama, history) at this time?

 

Transmission

  • What information do book dedications give us about contemporary ideas of literary forms vis-à-vis their audiences?
  • How do audiences and readers’ tastes change in response to developments in genre? How do audiences provoke change in genre?
  • How do the activities of printers/publishers/booksellers contribute to the transmission of styles in fiction (and of the forms of books) from one place to another?
  • What role does illustration play in the presentation (and transmission) of text?
  • To what extent is translation an agent of change in seventeenth-century fiction?
  • What role does the circulation of texts in manuscript play in the development of seventeenth-century fiction?
  • How does fiction react to censorship? To what extent is fiction used as propaganda (political/religious)?
  • How does the changing role of women in society contribute to the history of fiction at this moment?