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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. Contemporary readers identified with the heroism such works promoted, because escape heroes most often define themselves via their confrontation with the arbitrary power of the sovereign, prefiguring the boldness of the French Revolution.
List of contents
A Note on Translations
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Michael J. Mulryan and Denis Grélé
One A Model for Eighteenth-Century Récits d'évasion: Odysseus's Flight from Polyphemus's Cave
Michael J. Mulryan
Two The "Slippery Eel": Escape Episodes and Ideological Ambiguity in Eighteenth-Century Criminal Biographies, The Cases of Louis-Dominique Cartouche and John Sheppard
Léa Lebourg-Leportier
Three Having a Cage in Her Hand: Escaping Representations of Comtesse de La Motte-Valois
Claire Trévien
Four Du plaisir dans ma solitude: Finding Pleasure in the Prisons of Manon Lescaut
Rori Bloom
Five Utopia 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
About the author
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.
