Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction.

Abstract

This challenging new study of the eighteenth-century French novel engages with recent post-structuralist thought to present a more theoretical than historical approach to the genre. Dr Bennington's focus of interest is sententiousness - maxims, aphorisms, generalising truth-claims of all sorts - in texts of narrative fiction. He exposes the inadequacy of both traditional and more modem analyses which have attempted to separate sententious elements from fictional contexts thereby underestimating the function of sententiousness to lay down the law, in both descriptive and prescriptive senses of the term. The author's approach to his chosen texts is pragmatic rather than formal, reading the eighteenth-century novel of worldliness in the light of the discourse of pedagogy, and exploring the relationship of the fictional and political in the work of Rousseau and Sade. The upshot of this investigation demonstrates both how the law is laid down in fiction and how fiction undermines the law which attempts to control it.