SOURCE: “La Nouvelle Héloïse and the Public of 1761,” in Yale French Studies, No. 28, 1961, pp. 13-19.

In the following excerpt, Mead examines the impact of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse when it was first published, and assesses its impact on the subsequent history of the novel.

Towards the middle of the 18th century, the novel—or rather, the Novel—disentangling itself from wicked nurses, stolen wills, and the adventures of terribly handsome princes, and already beginning to demonstrate by actual examples that its natural domain was what Thomas Hardy called “the presentation of the uncommon in ordinary life,” faced a serious threat to its continuing development as a serious genre in the widespread human tendency to complicate simple things whenever possible. If any one thing is characteristic of advanced states of civilization, it seems to be a fatal weakness for talking about what one is...