Zmyślność wielorakości, czyli Les Femmes militaires Ludwika Rustaing de Saint-Jory – utopijno-egzotyczna metafikcja z 1735 r.
The ingenuity of multiplicity, or Les Femmes militaires by Louis Rustaing de Saint-Jory, an utopian-exotic metafiction from 1735

Author(s): Izabella Zatorska
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: Les Femmes militaires; Louis Rustaing de Saint-Jory; metafiction; Jean-Paul Sermain
Summary/Abstract: The analyzed text, despite its short length (just slightly over 300 in-12° pages), iscomposed of samples of several genres popular in the first quarter of the 18th century.It doesn’t form a coherent unity from the point of view of romance conventions. Similarstrategies of “disturbed” narrations were described by Jean-Paul Sermain in hiswork on metafictions: short prosaic texts paradoxically concentrated on revealingtheir own conventionality, against the habits of building the illusion through narration.Les Femmes militaires, relation historique d’une île nouvellement découverte, enrichiede figures. Dédié à Monseigneur le Chevalier d’Orléans. Par le C.D***, presentsa multi-levelexoticism – in the referential and aesthetic meaning. The narrator’ssailing to the titular island takes over ten months and is (fortunately) uneventful, asif the island was 110 thousand kilometres away from England – which is an obviouswink at the reader. A patchwork, pastiche, or maybe an anti-romance pamphlet?What could result from these aesthetic choices, back then as well as nowadays, constitutesa question which Louis Rustaing de Saint-Jory’s work forces us to pose.

• Details
• Contents