{"product_id":"a-taste-for-the-foreign-ellen-r-welch-9781644531396","title":"A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Taste for the Foreign\u003c\/i\u003e examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot's 1547 translation of \u003ci\u003eThe Ethiopian Story\u003c\/i\u003e to Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century version of \u003ci\u003eThe Thousand and One Nights\u003c\/i\u003e. 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 offer a superior source for the novelty, variety, and marvelousness that constituted fiction's appeal. In this sense, early modern fiction presents itself as privileged site for thinking through the literary and cultural stakes of exoticism, or the taste for the foreign. Long before the term exoticism came into common parlance in France, fiction writers thus demonstrated their understanding of the special kinds of aesthetic pleasure produced by evocations of foreignness, developing techniques to simulate those delights through imitations of the exotic. As early modern readers eagerly consumed travel narratives, maps, and international newsletters, novelists discovered ways to blur the distinction between true and imaginary representations of the foreign, tantalizing readers with an illusion of learning about the faraway lands that captured their imaginations.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis book analyzes the creative appropriations of those scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places. Concentrating on the most successful examples of some of the most important sub-genres of prose fiction in the long seventeenth century-heroic romances, shorter urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages-the book examines how these types of fiction creatively appropriate the scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places.\u003c\/p\u003e Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Ellen R. Welch\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1644531399\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781644531396\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Delaware Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 03\/14\/2011\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 248\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.83lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.58d","brand":"Ellen R. Welch","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46670482538751,"sku":"9781644531396","price":52.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_047aac7d-c2d3-4563-a4be-8460993ca8d0.jpg?v=1741316925","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/a-taste-for-the-foreign-ellen-r-welch-9781644531396","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}