A Singular Duality : Literary Relations Between France and England in the Eighteenth Century

In ""A Singular Duality"", Robert J. Frail delineates in nine separate essays the complex but ordered progression of ideas in literature that bound two nations, divided by politics and often by war, into an orchestrated cultural collusion, drawn from the emotive power of the memoir novel and served by translators who understood the diversity of the European market. Each essay presents information useful in the discussion of literary relations between France and England, which may have been cultivated far more by the mutual interest in the travel books, memoir novels, and other types of adaptations that surfaced when prose fiction began to push up against poetic discourses and philosophical tracts. In his nine essays, Frail discusses aspects of this general topic, ranging from the extraordinary success of the English memoir novel in French translation carried out by Dutch publishing houses, to France and the American Revolution as seen from the perspective of intellectual and cultural history, to the incapacity of Islamic culture to modernize. Furthermore, he reflects on works of literature such as Laclos's ""Les Liaisons Dangereuses"", Frances Sheridan's ""Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph"", Diderot's ""La Religieuse"", Montesquieu's ""Les Lettres Persanes"", and Rousseau's ""Julie, Ou La Nouvelle Heloise"".