Memory and Desire: Retif de la Bretonne, Autobiography and Utopia

This study challenges the conventional view of Retif de la Bretonne as a chronicler of eighteenth-century France and notorious exponent of 'la litterature galante', to provide both students and scholars with a fresh analysis focusing on two themes - autobiography and utopianism - which feature prominently in his writing. It suggests that each is the product of similar impulses, reflecting common polarities between public and private, self and others, past and future. In tracing Retif's persistent but frustrated attempts to reconcile the conflicting elements of the world he inhabits - rural and urban, old and new, stable and changing - this volume analyses the failure of his utopian dream of a well-ordered and harmonious society. By exploring his absorption in the autobiographical project, and in particular Monsieur Nicolas ou le c/ur humain devoile, it offers an interpretation of his work as a sustained reflection on selfhood and on the power of memory which enables Retif to create, within the confines of the text, a utopian space where self and world are reconciled, and time and space no longer count.