Jeux littéraires en France et en Angleterre au XVIIe siècle – des salons parisiens à Aphra Behn

Abstract

In seventeenth-century France (dominated by the phenomenon of « galanterie »), life at court and in the salons is characterized by a culture of playful conversation, which is encouraged by the influence of préciosité. This oral playful culture translates into a ludic literature in prose or verse which continues the social conversation through a proliferation of minor genres, often gathered in collective miscellanies, such as published letters or billets, portraits and maxims, odes, madrigals, songs, sonnets or fictional genres. This study focusses on verbal games, or games of conversation, and their literary avatars. After looking at the French context, it shows that these conversation games, which were born within a specific salon culture, were not as popular in England as they were in France. The second half of this study focusses on the adaptation in Restoration England of one of the French literary works that was produced by the salon game culture: Aphra Behn’s La Montre, or The Lover’s Watch (1686) which revises a narrative by Balthazar de Bonnecorse. It studies the strategies of adaptation and mediation applied to this characteristic product of the French ludic gallant literature, here tailored for a Restoration mixed readership.

Keywords

• play
• literary games
• wit
• conversation
• XVIIth century
• cultural exchanges between France and England