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Hannah Stuart
Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances
Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances
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Excerpt:
The four Prefaces here reprinted occupy a place in the long argument about Romance somewhat apart from the developments which preceded the emergence of the novel proper in eighteenth-century England. The secret antinomy in their authors with regard to the art they are practising is as clearly revealed by the compulsion to give Romance a new and, above all, a serious purpose as by the embarrassing discovery of so much that was otiose in the already existing forms. At heart they shared with Arnauld the opinion he expressed of Scudéry’s Clelie in his famous letter to Perrault. “Que ce soit, si vous voulez, le plus beau de tous les Romans; mais enfin c’est un Roman. C’est tout dire.”
The four Prefaces here reprinted occupy a place in the long argument about Romance somewhat apart from the developments which preceded the emergence of the novel proper in eighteenth-century England. The secret antinomy in their authors with regard to the art they are practising is as clearly revealed by the compulsion to give Romance a new and, above all, a serious purpose as by the embarrassing discovery of so much that was otiose in the already existing forms. At heart they shared with Arnauld the opinion he expressed of Scudéry’s Clelie in his famous letter to Perrault. “Que ce soit, si vous voulez, le plus beau de tous les Romans; mais enfin c’est un Roman. C’est tout dire.”