The Inn and the Traveller
Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel

Will McMorran

Legenda (General Series)

Legenda

1 December 2002  •  292pp

ISBN: 1-900755-64-5 (paperback)  •  RRP £75, $99, €85

EnlightenmentFrenchFiction


In the rich landscape of the early modern European comic novel the inn often features as a monument to digression - the perfect setting for chance encounters with strangers who always have a story to tell. McMorran, in this wide-ranging comparative study, explores the special part played by the inn, tracing the progress of a succession of wayward heroes and narrators in five canonical texts: Cervantes's Don Quijote, Scarron's Roman comique, Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste. As this celebration of digressive fiction unfolds, a very different picture emerges of the rise and development of the novel.

Will McMorran is Lecturer in French at Queen Mary, University of London.

Reviews:

  • ‘The book could serve, almost by the way, as a brief introduction to the modes of early narrative fiction in any of the European languages on which it draws.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies XL.1, 2004, 112
  • ‘McMorran's approach offers a number of intriguing comparisons among a set of novels not itherto considered together in a single study. It places Fielding and Sterne within a broader European context, which so many Anglocentric treatments fail to do. Most important, it usefully interrogates the ways that travel within a text reflects, influences, and subverts travel through a text.’ — Joseph F. Bartolomeo, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17:2, 2005, 288-90
  • ‘A highly accomplished comparatist, McMorran respects the specificities of the national traditions to which the works he discusses belong while teasing out the overarching European narrative on which his interpretation depends.’ — Charles Forsdick, Modern Language Review 102.1, January 2007, 187-88 (full text online)

Bibliography entry:

McMorran, Will, The Inn and the Traveller: Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel (Legenda, 2002)

First footnote reference: 35 Will McMorran, The Inn and the Traveller: Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel (Legenda, 2002), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 McMorran, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

McMorran, Will. 2002. The Inn and the Traveller: Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (McMorran 2002: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 McMorran 2002: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)


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