Ebook: A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction

A Taste for the Foreign examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot's 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. While fantastic storylines and elements of magic were increasingly shunned by a neo-classicist literary culture that valued verisimilitude above all else, writers and critics surmised that the depiction of exotic lands could offera superior source for the novelty, variety, and marvelousness that constituted fiction's appeal. In this sens.