There and Back Again: The Country and the City in the Fiction of Rétif de la Bretonne
Peter Wagstaff, University of Bath
Volume 10, no. 4, July 1998
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ABSTRACT
Widening horizons exemplify the spirit of the eighteenth century. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the adventure of travel, both beyond and within borders, is matched by the philosophical and epistemological adventure that accompanies broadening knowledge and an enhanced sense of relativism. The aphoristic irony of Pascal’s earlier “verite au deca des Pyrenees, erreur au dela” is given weight by texts as diverse in form and content as Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, Prevost’s Manon Lescaut, and De Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Peruvienne, which, like countless others, all bear witness both to an awareness of geographical, spatial difference and to the need for an analysis of that difference and its impact on previously unquestioned assumptions and beliefs. The revaluations which are thus brought to bear reflect virtually every aspect of human experience: religious, scientific, moral, political, philosophical, and social. Further, the French espousal of the empirical rationalism of Locke and subsequently Hume, which can be seen as the basis for the Enlightenment assertion that the human mind is formed by the sense impressions it receives from the world around it, lent substantial weight to the importance of experience and environment in the development of personality. Human beings could be seen as existentially, rather than essentially determined: where and when they lived their lives mattered.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Rétif de la Bretonne” include:
Rétif, Sade, and the Origins of Pornography: Le Pornographe as Anti-Text of La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by AMY S. WYNGAARD (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
L’Individualité romanesque au XVIIIe siècle: une lecture foucaldienne
by CARSTEN MEINER (ECF 18.1, Fall 2005)
Privacy, Publicity, Pornography: Restif de la Bretonne’s Ingénue Saxancour, ou La Femme séparée
by RORI BLOOM (ECF 17.2, January 2005)
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