The Thousand and First Author: Thomas-Simon Gueullette's Repeating Fictions

Abstract

"By imitating orientalists’ work, which conformed to scholarly as well as literary standards that adjusted representations of other cultures to meet readers’ expectations, Gueullette relativized their projects by relocating them within a fictional frame. The paratexts - including prefaces as well as titles, footnotes, and illustrations - to his collections of tales progressively reveal that the reproduction of prefatory formulae provides implicit commentary about the French tradition of translation....It is possible to trace this development of the relation between copy and original by examining the changes in how Gueullette presented himself, first as a translator and then as an author."