Ds in Philology, Professor, Leading Researcher of the Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The paper analyzes some pastoral novels by the once popular French writer Jean-Pierre Clary de Florian, created at the end of the Enlightenment against the background of active reflection on the pastoral genre and fixing the process of naturalization of the pastoral ideal in sentimentalism. Starting with the translation-alteration of the Spanish pastoral novel of the Renaissance Galatea by Cervantes, Florian then draws the idyllic past of his native land in the novel Estelle. The heroes of his pastorals are not noble gentlemen, as in the exemplary Baroque pastoral novel Astrée by H. d’Urfé, not a reflective community of Renaissance intellectuals, as in Cervantes’ Galatea, but simple villagers, envied by townfolk because of their serene life. Sensibility and moralization come to the fore in Florian’s sentimentalist pastorals.
meta-genre; pastoral novel; idyll; sentimentalism; Rousseauism.