Home > ECF > Vol. 23 > Iss. 4 (2011)
Abstract
Writers across Europe found inspiration in the events and social ramifications of the French Revolution, which exerted a harmonizing effect on novelistic production. The dispersal of émigrés provided a common series of plot devices through which writers could explore notions of identity and the interplay of politics and sensibility. Émigrés drew on personal experiences for their own novels about emigration, but other European writers also used emigration in their work. Interaction, adaptation, translation, and illustration across nations and languages all contributed to the development of the émigré novel as a genre. This article explores how closely writers of different nationalities, especially French, German, Swiss, and English, were linked by a common approach and how shared plot devices and themes lead to a homogenization of the émigré novel as a sub-genre of the sentimental novel.
Recommended Citation
Astbury, Katherine
(2011)
"The Trans-National Dimensions of the Émigré Novel during the French Revolution,"
Eighteenth-Century Fiction:
Vol. 23:
Iss.
4, Article 7.
Available at:
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol23/iss4/7
Contributor's Note
Katherine Astbury teaches in the Department of French Studies at The University of Warwick; she has published on Prévost, Beaumarchais, Marmontel, Baculard d'Arnaud, and Sade, and is currently working on a book on "non-political" fiction of the 1790s as a response to the trauma of the French Revolution.
Astbury images as separate file