The Virtuous Orphan Or The Life Of Marianne Countess Of Translated By Mary Collyer From The French

Marivaux s "La vie de Marianne "was one of the most popular novels of the eighteenth century. Three different but related English translations appeared between 1736 and 1746 and were reprinted at least a dozen times by 1786. Fielding and Fanny Burney openly admitted the influence of Marivaux. Sterne has been connected with him by scholars, and the Richardson-Marivaux problem (particularly the influence upon "Pamela) "has been discussed since the eighteenth century. References to the novel and the novelist are to be found in the works, correspondence, or conversations of such figures as Gray, Chesterfield, Johnson, Arthur Murphy, James Beattie, Horace Walpole, and the Earl of Orrery a clear indication that the work is valuable not only as a direct influence upon the English novel but also as a touchstone of taste during the period.However, no new edition has appeared since 1746, with the exception of a severely condensed and rearranged redaction by Sir Gilbert Campbell in 1889, of which a copy exists in the Bodleian library. To fill this need, the editors of this new edition have selected the 1743 translation of Mrs. Mary Collyer, entitled "The Virtuous Orphan"; or, " The Life of Marianne, Countess of "* * * * * as the best version stylistically and as the most interesting, since it includes the eleven parts written by Marivaux and concludes both the story of Marianne and of "La Religieuse, "which he left unfinished. The Collyer version, therefore, offers students of English and comparative literature an interesting exercise in eighteenth-century methods of translation and adaptation as well as the instructive metamorphosis (in the added twelfth part) of the French Marianne into an English heroine, who greatly resembles Richardson s Pamela.Rarely equaled as a psychological study of the consummate coquette, the novel also provides an unusually detailed and witty analysis of the early eighteenth-century balance of reason and sensibility, which was to be a key motif in English fiction until the time of Jane Austen and beyond.This edition, prepared with notes and a critical introduction by W. H. McBurney and Michael Shugrue, provides the complex bibliographical history of "Marianne, "its chronology of editions, and a list of useful studies. Spelling, punctuation, and paragraphing have been modernized without textual change."

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the 'long' eighteenth century-in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, 'the novel' finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook not only covers those 'masters and mistresses' of early prose fiction-such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott and Austen-who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently-rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel, such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the re-printing of popular fiction after 1774, offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

Blending history, architecture and literary analysis, this ground-breaking study explores the convent's place in the early modern imagination. After the Council of Trent imposed strict claustral enclosure, the nun became an intensified object of desire in male-authored narratives. Convents also inspired feminutopian discourses by women writers. Recent criticism has identified spaces that women have made their own: the ruelle, the salon, the hearth of fairy tales. Woshinsky's book definitively adds the convent to this list.

Drawing on three decades of feminist scholarship bent on rediscovering lost and abandoned women writers, Susan Staves provides a comprehensive history of women's writing in Britain from the Restoration to the French Revolution. This major work of criticism also offers fresh insights about women's writing in all literary forms, not only fiction, but also poetry, drama, memoir, autobiography, biography, history, essay, translation and the familiar letter. Authors celebrated in their own time and who have been neglected, and those who have been revalued and studied, are given equal attention. The book's organisation by chronology and its attention to history challenge the way we periodise literary history. Each chapter includes a list of key works written in the period covered, as well as a narrative and critical assessment of the works. This magisterial work includes a comprehensive bibliography and list of prevalent editions of the authors discussed.

Fiction has always been in a state of transformation and circulation: how does this history of mobility inform the emergence of the novel? The Spread of Novels explores the active movements of English and French fiction in the eighteenth century and argues that the new literary form of the novel was the result of a shift in translation. Demonstrating that translation was both the cause and means by which the novel attained success, Mary Helen McMurran shows how this period was a watershed in translation history, signaling the end of a premodern system of translation and the advent of modern literary exchange. McMurran illuminates aspects of prose fiction translation history, including the radical revision of fiction's origins from that of cross-cultural transfer to one rooted by nation; the contradictory pressures of the book trade, which relied on translators to energize the market, despite the increasing devaluation of their labor; and the dynamic role played by prose fiction translation in Anglo-French relations across the Channel and in the New World. McMurran examines French and British novels, as well as fiction that circulated in colonial North America, and she considers primary source materials by writers as varied as Frances Brooke, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Françoise Graffigny. The Spread of Novels reassesses the novel's embodiment of modernity and individualism, discloses the novel's surprisingly unmodern characteristics, and recasts the genre's rise as part of a burgeoning vernacular cosmopolitanism.