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A contribution to: Voyages

Edited by Emily Di Dodo and Rachel Hayes

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 18

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s 1803 ‘nouvelle’ La femme philosophe is often approached by scholars as a stand-alone text, considered only in relation to its French author and its circulation in early nineteenth-century France. Yet, on reading the text’s ‘Avertissement’, we discover that Genlis’s ‘nouvelle’ finds its origins in Charles Lloyd’s 1798 novel Edmund Oliver. In claiming that her text ‘n’est qu’une imitation’ of Lloyd’s, Genlis positions La femme philosophe as a step in the journey of the source text, not only across the English-French border, but also across the threshold between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through close readings of the source and target texts, this paper proposes that Genlis’s La femme philosophe ultimately represents a ‘hijacking’ of Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver. By displacing the male protagonist and introducing references to the French writer Germaine de Staël, Genlis seizes the English novel and leads its characters and its plot towards a new destination, one which is designed to serve the imitator’s purpose of engaging with contemporary French discourse on morality, religion, and female agency. As such, the text itself embodies a transfer of power and ownership from the English author to the French translator: Lloyd’s ‘novel’ becomes Genlis’s ‘nouvelle’.

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