‘Half Sign, Half Ad’: Literary and Commercial Functions of Paratextual and In-Text Titles in the Novels of Pietro Chiari

This article builds on studies by Claude Duchet and Franco Moretti on the function of novel titles as literary and commercial signifiers, but argues that the scope needs to be extended further, to what we may call paratextual and in-text titles: book titles that appear in prefaces and within novel texts. The article examines a set of novels written by Pietro Chiari (1712-1785) that makes use of such title references. In the early stages of his novel production, Chiari mobilised French and British novel titles in an appropriation of these novelistic traditions. The Brescian writer then gradually abandoned the project of appropriation and began to reference only his own titles. Thus, the use of paratextual and in-text titles primarily took on an advertisement function. The article argues that these title references are embedded into a marketing strategy based on establishing a serial aspect to Chiari’s novels

«Voyageons avec lui»: la métaphore viatique dans la critique périodique française des relations de voyage (1775–1815)

This article examines the use of travel metaphors in French periodical reviews of non-fiction travelogues at the turn of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. The French periodical press took an increasing interest in travel literature in this period, forming an important instance of mediation between travel writers and the reading public. In travel-book reviews, journalists would frequently make use of a rhetoric aimed at presenting the periodical text as a double co-experience: an imaginary travel in the wake of the travel writer and a ‘travel’ through the journalist’s own reading experience. The article shows how this metaphor appears as a diverse rhetorical device that served different functions within the periodical text. Clearly aimed at engaging the reader in the text, the metaphor can also be read as conveying a meta-discourse that highlights the reviewers’ appropriation and remediation of the travelogue. The article analyses occurrences of the travel metaphor in reviews taken from a varied set of periodicals – journals, advertisers, and newspapers – in order to shed light on how the French periodical press operated in retransmitting literary travel experiences in a golden age of non-fiction travel writing

Mediating Anglophobia: Political and Cultural Conflict in the French Periodical Reception of British Travel Writing (1792-1814)

This article analyses a set of French periodical articles on British travel writing, exploring the complex and ambivalent relationship that the French press entertained with translations of British travelogues. As travel writing was a highly popular genre in this period, but also politically charged, its periodical reception in revolutionary and Napoleonic France offers a rich object of study for understanding the entanglement of political and cultural conflict. In a political climate heavily influenced by the military conflicts between France and Great Britain, and dealing with a travel book market dominated by translations from English, the French periodical travel review partakes in the overall mediation of national stereotypes. Relatively restrained in literary journals of the Directoire such as the Magasin encyclopédique and La Décade philosophique, the mediation of stereotypes turns into outright Anglophobic propaganda in the Napoleonic Journal de l’Empire

Livet etterlikner kunsten. Speilingen mellom verk og liv som meningsproduserende figur i lesninger av Jean Potockis Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse

International audienceThis article presents the history of Jan Potocki's novel Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, exploring how the publication history of the book mirrors the story contained in the text. New manuscripts were discovered in 2002 that completely changed the reception of Potocki's novel. The discovery revealed that the author had written two distinct versions of the text. It also led to the conclusion that the nineteenth-century Polish translation, which had until then dominated the reception of the text, was a combination of the two versions, and therefore highly unreliable. This translation had a crucial influence on the twentieth-century editions and translations, causing what in retrospect are rather curious interpretations. Intriguingly, this publication history appears as a reflexion of the novel's own plot, which tells the story of the discovery of a manuscript containing numerous stories in different languages, and which thematizes the hermeneutical difficulties in dealing with a world in which the truth can only appear in fragments. The article explores how this mirroring of life and art may serve as a productive tool for hermeneutical enquiry

Re-viewing the world: appropriations of travel writing in the French periodical press (1780–1820)

This article analyses practices of appropriation at work in French travel book reviews at the turn of the eighteenth century. It establishes six categories of appropriation, consisting of rhetorical, literary and formal devices, which entail different ways of altering, sometimes radically, sometimes almost imperceptibly, the value and functions of the travel texts. The article argues that travel book reviews operated to alter the representation of travel, in a form of journalistic criticism which sought not only to review a book, but also to remediate and appropriate a set of experiences, thus re-viewing the world described by the travelogue. The analysis of these appropriative practices sheds new light on the role of the French press as an actor in the public discourse on travel, history and geography, in a period where non-fictional travel writing was immensely popular among the reading public

Stranden hos Elena Ferrante

This article makes a topocritical reading of the Mediterranean beach in four works by the Italian contemporary novelist Elena Ferrante: L’amore molesto (1992), La figlia oscura (2006), La spiaggia di notte (2007) and L’amica geniale (2011-2014). The topocritical approach is here to be understood as the examination of the role played by geographical places in the formation of literary themes. The article argues that the beach as a setting has an important formative function in the development of key themes in Ferrante’s works, related to complex mother-daughter relations, gender roles, and social class. The analysis reveals how the texts mobilise and play with a set of culturally and historically conditioned perceptions of the beach: the border zone, the liminal area, the free zone, and the domesticated landscape. These perceptions serve to construct the beach as a symbolically charged landscape, which in turn helps shape the psychological, emotional, and social processes that the literary characters go through. The notion of the liminal area is particularly important, turning the beach into an emblematic place for the author’s thematization of in-between-ness

Rewriting and Remediation: The Reviews of Bartolomeo Benincasa's Journal d’un voyageur neutre (1796) in the Monthly Review and La Décade philosophique

The reviews in the Monthly Review and La Décade philosophique of Bartolomeo Benincasa's travelogue from revolutionary France, Journal d’un voyageur neutre (1796), offer valuable insight into the periodical practice of the travel review. The present article examines the processes of rewriting and remediation at work in these reviews, showing how they were driven by political concerns, but also by different views on the function of the review within the larger framework of the periodicals. The article argues that rewriting and remediation are important analytical tools to be put to use if book reviews are to be better exploited as historical sources. We can thereby acquire a better understanding of the role of the travel review in late-eighteenth-century literary culture, notably of its complexity in transmitting and constructing perceptions of major historical events such as the French Revolution