Man of Quality, Man of Letters

The Abbé Prévost between Novel and Newspaper

Rori Bloom

2009
205 pages
ISBN 9781611483192
Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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.

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About the author:

Rori Bloom is an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida.

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