Man of Quality, Man of Letters: The Abbe Prevost between Novel and Newspaper

Best known for the short novel Manon Lescaut, Antoine-François Prévost was also the author of a dictionary, several important translations, an extensive corpus of historical writing, a dozen novels, and more than twenty volumes of journalism. While much of his fiction is reminiscent of the adventure stories of baroque novelists, Prévost's nonfiction expresses an encyclopedic ambition that prefigures the intellectual enterprises of the philosophes . In her exploration of the tension between his novelistic and journalistic writing, Rori Bloom argues that Prévost's novels employ established and even archaic attitudes toward authorship, while his newspaper elaborates a new understanding of the roles of author and public. By juxtaposing Prévost's novels and newspaper, Bloom analyzes the sophisticated literary strategies through which this author constructed his complex professional identity.