Transformations du genre romanesque

Abstract

In the past few years, when I taught courses on eighteenth-century French literature in English translation to American undergraduates, I would often begin by showing brief clips from three Disney animated films: Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella. The students never had any difficulty identifying the films, but had only wild guesses to answer the question What do these films have to do with this course? They are, of course, all works of French fiction from the long eighteenth century, and an impressive demonstration of how much that old and foreign culture is still alive and familiar in middle-class twenty-first-century southern New Jersey. Readers of Eighteenth-Century Fiction would know the answer to my question, but even they sometimes need to be reminded, I think, of the diversity of the field so succinctly named in the journal's title. For Aladdin ou la lampe merveilleuse, La Belle et la bete, and Cendrillon are far removed from what English speakers usually mean by novel or French speakers by roman. They are tales of the supernatural, of fairies and genies, of spells and enchantments. They are short. They derive from folk traditions. They are, and always were, regarded as children's literature. Prose fiction as it flourished and evolved in France in the eighteenth century was marked by a profusion of subgenres. Some were obviously modern descendants of traditional forms such as the epic or tales in the style of Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, and Cervantes. Some were parodie or burlesque versions of those traditional forms. Around the end