Imagination, Textual Play, and the Fantastic in Mouhy’s Lamékis
Peter Fitting, University of Toronto
Volume 5, no. 4, July 1993
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
At 650 pages and several plots, Charles de Fieux, chevalier de Mouhy’s Lamékis ou les voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la term inthieure; avec la dcouverte de I’Isle des Sylphides (1735-38) is a forgotten but rather unusual and even original novel. Set in the distant past (well before the flourishing of Greek civilization), its characters move from ancient Egypt through a number of fantastic countries in a series of adventures reminiscent of Lucian’s True Histories or, more probably, Galland’s recent translation of the Mille et une nuits (1704-17). The complicated narrative follows very generally the adventures of Lamékis, and consists of a number of different plots and sub-plots, which I have reduced to five and rearranged into chronological order.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Imagination” include:
Natural History and Narrative Sympathy: The Children’s Animal Stories of Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842)
by JANE SPENCER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Narratives of Emergence: Jean Paul on the Inner Life
by WILLIAM N. COKER (ECF 21.3, Spring 2009)
The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier
by SHARON ALKER (ECF 19.1-2, Fall 2006)
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