18th-Century Literature
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Francophone Studies
French Literature
Literary Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781611487701
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 158 x 238mm
- Publication Date: 20 Jul 2016
- Publisher: Bucknell University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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This volume is a study of the interdisciplinary nature of prison escape tales and their impact on European cultural identity in the eighteenth century. Prison escape narratives are reflections of the tension between the individual’s potential happiness via freedom and the confines of the social order. Contemporary readers identified with the prisoner, who, like them suffered the injustices of an absolutist regime. The state imprisons such renegades not just out of a desire to protect the public but more importantly to protect the state itself. Hence, prison escape tales can be linked with a revolutionary tendency: when free, such former detainees equipped with a pen openly and justly challenge the status quo, hoping to inspire their readers to do the same. Escape tales have had a considerable impact on cultural identity, because they embody the interdependent relationship between literature and myth on the one hand and literature and history on the other.
Michael J. Mulryan is associate professor of French at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. His research focuses primarily on the representation of urban space and the marginalized in eighteenth-century French literature. He has published several articles on Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Jean-François Marmontel, and l’Abbé Bucquoy, which have appeared in academic journals, such as 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, XVIII: New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, Cithara: Essays in Judeo-Christian Tradition, Dalhousie French Studies, and L’Érudit Franco-Espagnol.
Denis Grélé is associate professor of French at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. His research interests are French Utopias in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He is the author of Travailler en utopie: Les Condamnés du Bonheur (1675-1789) (2009), and of numerous articles on Lesage, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Madame de la Guette, and utopia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in academic journals, such as Les Cahiers du XVIIème siècle, L’Érudit Franco-Espagnol, Neophilologus, Seventeenth-Century Studies, and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth xCentury.
