Философский роман эпохи Просвещения : (вопросы генезиса и жанрового своеобразия)

Abstract

The essay deals with the problems of philosophical novel as genre modification. 'The sources of the European philosophical novel are found in the 17th-century fiction when the "forerunners” of this novelistic form appeared (Gracian-y-Morales' El Criticon Fenelon's Les aventures de Tóćlćmaque). The genesis and earlier development of the genre modification took place in the Age of Enlightenment. The author of the essay polemizes with the attempts to define as novels the 18th-century prosaic works where novelistic parameters do not prevail (Montesquieu's Letters Persanes, Du Laurens Compere Mathieu, numerous utopias and anti-utopias). : Genre peculiarity of the 18th-century philosophical novel is being described on the basis, of the books of Voltaire, S. Johnson and D. Diderot. Philosophical conflict (juxtaposition of different doctrines or contesting a false conception) is considered to be the main genre-modifying principle of the form under investigation. Such conflict is realized not in philosophic dialogues and mediations but in the principles of plot-building, the system of personages, the mode of spatial and temporal organization of the text.