Man of Quality, Man of Letters The Abbe Prevost between Novel and Newspaper

by Bloom, Rori

• ISBN13: 9781611483192
• ISBN10: 1611483190
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-01
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Summary

Best known for the short novel Manon Lescaut, Antoine-FranYois Pr_vost 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, Pr_vost'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 Pr_vost'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 Pr_vost's novels and newspaper, Bloom analyzes the sophisticated literary strategies through which this author constructed his complex professional identity.