Designing Truth between Manuscript and Publication: The Eighteenth-Century French Vision of Peru in Marmontel's Les Incas (1777).

This essay interrogates the tensions between historical fact and colonial fiction in Jean-François Marmontel's Les Incas, ou le destruction de l'Empire du Pérou (1777). Through this study of deleted passages and publisher notes in the 1776 manuscript of the novel (Houghton Library, Harvard Universit...

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Publicado en:Eighteenth Century Fiction Vol. 36; no. 2; pp. 303 - 308
Autor principal: Ficek, Agnieszka Anna
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: University of Toronto Press Apr2024
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Designing Truth between Manuscript and Publication: The Eighteenth-Century French Vision of Peru in Marmontel's Les Incas (1777).
      aug:
        au: Ficek, Agnieszka Anna
        affil: Postdoctoral research fellow at the Custard Institute for Spanish Art And Culture, Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
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        Manuscripts
        Imperialism
        Historical fiction
        Publications
        Europe
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          Europe
          Manuscripts
          Imperialism
          Historical fiction
          Publications
      ab: This essay interrogates the tensions between historical fact and colonial fiction in Jean-François Marmontel's Les Incas, ou le destruction de l'Empire du Pérou (1777). Through this study of deleted passages and publisher notes in the 1776 manuscript of the novel (Houghton Library, Harvard University), Marmontel's concern with verisimilitude, truth, and objective reality belies the fantasy of conquest and the myths of American Indigeneity that are central to eighteenth-century French understandings and imaginings of the Inca Empire and the American continent as a whole. Politically, the novel served a dual purpose: to vehemently denounce the Spanish conquest of the Americas and to subversively critique the "fanaticism" of the ancien régime in the years leading up the 1789 Revolution. Across the Atlantic, the novel was read by generals of the Latin American Wars of Independence, and it shifted from an allegorical text to a direct call for revolution. Despite Marmontel's aim of creating a philosophical and historical novel, Les Incas perpetuates the hegemonies and hierarchies of colonialism, falling back onto well-established tropes. In choosing what was considered in Europe as "exotic" as a vehicle for political critique, Les Incas maintains and reinforces the very systems against which the revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century fought.
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