University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 168
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Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-61148-770-1 • Hardback • July 2016 • $109.00 • (£84.00)
978-1-61148-771-8 • eBook • July 2016 • $103.50 • (£80.00)
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, andInquiries in the Early Modern Era, XVIII:New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century,Cithara: Essays in Judeo-ChristianTradition, 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 Travailleren 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 Cahiersdu XVIIème siècle, L’Érudit Franco-Espagnol,Neophilologus, Seventeenth-CenturyStudies, and Studies on Voltaire and theEighteenth xCentury.
A Note on Translations
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Michael J. Mulryan and Denis Grélé
OneA Model for Eighteenth-Century Récits d’évasion: Odysseus’s Flight from Polyphemus’s Cave
Michael J. Mulryan
TwoThe “Slippery Eel”: Escape Episodes and Ideological Ambiguity in Eighteenth-CenturyCriminal Biographies, The Cases of Louis-Dominique Cartouche and John Sheppard
Léa Lebourg-Leportier
ThreeHaving a Cage in Her Hand: Escaping Representations of Comtesse de La Motte-Valois
Claire Trévien
FourDu plaisir dans ma solitude: Finding Pleasure in the Prisons of Manon Lescaut
Rori Bloom
FiveUtopia as a Prison: Escaping from the Land of Happiness in Tyssot de Patot’s Les Voyages et Avantures de Jaques Massé
Denis Grélé
Conclusion
Michael J. Mulryan and Denis Grélé
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors
Beyond the sheer entertainment value of the stories themselves (who would fail to be amused by Louis Dominique Cartouche’s adventures or enthralled with the scandal and gossip surrounding the “Affair of the Necklace”?), there is much to learn in this volume about eighteenth-century French popular culture and the shifting perception of those who escaped from prison in the period. Each essay brings a wealth of archival information and critical perspectives to its object of study and develops the central argument laid out by the two editors in their introduction.... Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales makes a convincing case that escape narratives should be considered important moments in the development and reinforcement of values that have become central to our understanding of the Enlightenment period.
— Eighteenth-Century Fiction