Regressive Fictions

<p>In a cultural shift around the mid-point of the French eighteenth century the mode of wit is increasingly displaced by bourgeois pathos. Social sophistication and sexual experience are rejected in favour of a retreat into ideal imagination. Instead of the novel of worldliness we encounter fictions of better worlds: original natural familial innocent and harmonious protected against reality and time. The regressive shift is traced in this study in general terms and then through detailed analysis of three of the best-selling novels of the period. The turning-point is represented by Mme de Graffignys Lettres dune Peruvienne (1747 1752) with its profound ambivalence towards knowledge. A new order is revealed and set out but still declared lacking in Rousseaus Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761). The visionary return to the organic wholeness of nature is offered by Bernardins Paul et Virginie (1788).</p>