French Prose Fiction Published between 1701 and 1750: A New Profile of Production

Abstract

Histories of the European novel, however defined—and French prose fiction in particular—generally concur that a taste for prose narrative, ofwhatever length or ilk, expanded explosively during the eighteenth century. Following the invention of the printing press in the late Middle Ages, a new leisure product, which at its origin addressed a limited clientele of well-born readers, by the late Enlightenment targeted both an hereditary gentry and a rapidly expanding cohort of middle-class consumers. The geographic expansion of European and New World readership, which could now choose between a still-voluminousproduction ofdramatic works and the competing genre of prose fiction, was not limited to large population centres. Rather, with an increase in the number of presses, autonomous or in consortia, and increasinglysophisticated networks of distributors, some with mail-order catalogues, urban as well as country readers could obtain new titles as well as re-editions ofpopular early and contemporaryworks. To support these broad generalizations about the Enlightenment book trade, we propose to concentrate on the production of prose fiction during the first half of the eighteenth century. The numbers that follow have been extrapolated from the nearly completed manuscript of our forthcoming Bibliographie du genre romanesque