Geo-Ethnicity, Epistolary Affect, and Reception in French Prose Fiction of the Enlightenment: An Experiment in Data Analysis
Richard L. Frautschi, Pennsylvania State University
Volume 7, no. 3, April 1995
©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
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 formats will undoubtedly influence the direction of future criticism. The present article is an exercise in the use of an expanded Bibliographie du genre romanesque francais, 1700 — 1800 (hereafter MMF-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 and epistolary discourse may appear at first glance to introduce an arbitrary relationship, the proximity offers some fresh perspectives on the four texts. More important, the exercise suggests directions which will help us to discriminate authorial and reader preferences in an emerging context of thousands of editions of French prose fiction published and republished during the century.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Bibliography” include:
The Empty Decade? English Fiction in the 1730s
by LACY MARSCHALK, MALLORY ANNE PORCH and PAULA R. BACKSCHEDIER (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
Clarissa Harlowe’s “Ode to Wisdom”: Composition, Publishing History, and the Semiotics of Printed Music
by THOMAS MCGEARY (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
Patterns of Marginality in French Prose Fiction, 1701–1800
by RICHARD L. FRAUTSCHI and ANGUS MARTIN (ECF 16.4, July 2004)
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