Dangerous Liaisons 2: The Riccoboni-Laclos Sequel
Janie Vanpée, Smith College
Volume 9, no. 1, October 1996
©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
From the double and contradictory pre-texts introducing the correspondence that constitutes the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) to the fictive correspondents’ careful articulation of their theories of reading and writing, Choderlos de Laclos’s novel foregrounds the problem of reading and examines the moral, social, and dramatic consequences of different models of reading. Even before the reader can laugh at the naive misreadings of social codes that Cécile recounts innocently in the novel’s first letter, the editor’s “avertissement” and the publisher’s preface propose and pit against each other at least two opposed models for reading the novel.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Laclos” include:
A Tale of Two Tactics: Laclos’s Novel Approach to Military Crisis and Reform
by JULIA ANNE OSMAN (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
Geo-Ethnicity, Epistolary Affect, and Reception in French Prose Fiction of the Enlightenment: An Experiment in Data Analysis
by RICHARD L. FRAUTSCHI (ECF 7.3, April 1995)
Merteuil and Mirrors: Stephen Frears’s Freudian Reading of Les Liaisons dangereuses
by ALAN J. SINGERMAN (ECF 5.3, April 1993)
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