THE TRIUMPHS OF AFFECTIONS: CRÉBILLON FILS, TRANSLATION AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NARRATIVES OF MOTION AND EMOTION

Abstract

The French influence on eighteenth-century English sentimental writing has been a rich topic for criticism ever since translations of French novels were imported into England as early as the first decades of the eighteenth century. In the “long” eighteenth-century history of English literature, there was a great deal of translation from French sources, which clearly indicates a market for fiction and the need to satisfy it (sources françaises were often mentioned as tokens of legitimacy). French sources took a stance on English realist fiction by infusing it with emotional narratives of men of feeling that hinged on acts of translation, whereby translation is understood not only as adaptation, but also as resistance against long-standing literary practices that advocated institutionalised moral codes in realistic fiction. Hence, the concerns of this study are threefold: to discuss the ambivalent nature that early modern philosophers granted to emotions, which triggered conflicting motions in an individual or in a specific social context, resulting in a taxonomy of passions; to consider Crébillon fils’s novel in English translation in order to epitomize the new type of discourse that intended to popularize virtue through eroticism, satire and decadence; and to re-ground human experience as it was discussed in eighteenth-century literary texts from the perspective of natural philosophy. This article aims to rethink eighteenth-century affective theory in relation to translation studies, while reading Thomas Hobbes’ concept of motion as a metaphor for the historical and mindset transformations that were fundamental to the writing of the history of literature.

Keywords

• translation
• sources françaises
• sentimental writing
• crébillon fils
• motion
• emotion
• eighteenth-century affective theory