Strategic Timing: Women’s Questions, Domestic Servitude, and the Dating Game in Montesquieu
Janet Gurkin Altman, University of Iowa
Volume 13, no. 2-3, Janvier-Avril 2001
©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
In 1954 Robert Shackleton cracked the code of the hybrid Persian-French calendar that Montesquieu used in the Lettres persanes, in which each letter was dated by the Christian calendar for day and year and by the Moslem calendar for months. Thanks to Shackleton’s work, and to the many textual scholars who have shown us how much attention Montesquieu paid to the dating, attribution, and ordering of letters in the manuscripts and editions that he himself prepared, it has become possible to propose new readings of the Lettres persanes both as a philosophical novel and as a fictional chronicle of life in France and Persia from 1711 to 1720.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Montesquieu” include:
Intertextual Conversations: The Love-Letter and the Footnote in Madame de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne
by AURORA WOLFGANG (ECF 10.1, October 1997)
Toujours Usbek
by PHILIP STEWART (ECF 11.2, January 1999)
La quète du savoir dans les Lettres persanes
by SYLVIE ROMANOWSKI (ECF 3.2, January 1991)
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