A chapter on the novel in France that focuses on two distinct decades of production in the early nineteenth century: the 1800s and the 1830s. The fiction of both of these periods gives salience to literature as a discourse of change. A number of the works of the 1800s represent isolated ventures in the production of their authors, where the confessional component looms large. This aspect was to exert an influence on several of the works that were published in the 1830s, though the latter period was also one in which other strands were to emerge in the practice of the novel, whose long-term impact was much more notable. In the meantime, the earlier works, a number of which were widely translated, had also come to shape no less significant interventions in other European literatures. An important factor that links novels of both periods is their role in shaping external perceptions of fiction in France. In this way, these works had a wider formative influence, with regard to the substance of the novel and also the condition and role of the novelist.

  A chronology