Suites arcadiennes : le roman sidnéien au-delà de sa fin

Abstract

Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (first published in 1590, but which had been circulating in manuscript form for a few years) gave rise to multiple imitations and continuations in seventeenth-century Britain, because of its popularity and of the author’s untimely death, which left the narrative incomplete, ending as it does on an unfinished sentence. Three of these continuations (by Sir William Alexander in 1616, Richard Bellings in 1621, and James Jouhnstoun in 1638) were published in new editions of Arcadia. These three texts prove how much the material specificities of Sidney’s romance, namely its episodic structure, fragmented composition, and double mode of publication, both in manuscript and in print, generated these imitations and determined their form. They also illustrate the complex genesis of authorship in early modern England, as these authors were trapped between modesty and self-affirmation.

Keywords

• Arcadia
• Sidney (Philip)
• pastoral
• continuation
• imitation
• materiality