Traitté de l'origine des romans

Pierre Daniel Huet's Trai[t]té de l'origine des Romans (Treatise on the Origin of Novels, or Romances) can claim to be the first history of fiction. It was originally published in 1670 as preface to Marie de la Fayette's novel Zayde. The following will give extended excerpts from the English translation by Stephen Lewis published in 1715. The title page reads:

Pages i-xi gave a preface by Lewis, p.[xii] added “Corrigenda”, p. 1-149 offered the translation under the short title “Original of Romances”.

The excerpt is extensive and it will mainly serve students of literature interested in the scope of questions and the method of arguing the early historian of literature showed—Huet was a modern cultural historian, one could say. (The German parallel page offers a summary of the plot with selected quotes and might be more comprehensive):

The beginning of romances is to be searched for in a far distant past and of interest to “the Curious in Antiquity”

The treatise has found a wide audience in Latin and French translations. The new English translation is designed to attract a growing audience:

"Instruction" is the next argument, yet Huet does not go into tedious details here. "Virtue" is placed against "Vice", "Disgrace" is to be avoided. The next step is the definition of "Romance" versus "Epic Poem". Both have one thing in common if one follows Aristotle's definition of Poesy: they are fictional:

The differences between histories and romances are connected with the fictional status—a problem is here caused by histories full of erroneous notions:

Huet excludes Histories if the authors wanted to give rue accounts and just failed and he excludes "fables":

The following part of the treatise touches the origin of "romances". The peoples of Asia, especially those of Egypt had, so Huet claims, proven a tendency to decipher all kinds of information. The hieroglyphs prove that. Their whole religion and all their histories were deciphered, mostly to exclude the population from further knowledge. Initiations were afforded before one would gain access to the secret cultural knowledge Egypt stored. The Greeks |<p. 17> had been extremely eager to learn from Egypt:

The Arabs exploited the same cultural knowledge—their Koran is, so Huet says filled with knowledge one cannot understand without interpretation. The Arabs translated Greek fables into their language and via Arabia [p. 20] these materials finally reached Europe. This is proven by the fact that only after the occupation of Spain first romances appeared in southern France. Huet discusses Persias culture—as particularly obscure and full of secret knowledge, he mentions the Indians [p. 27] as particularly fond of poesy, before he speaks of the influence the Bible had on the western civilization and its love of fictions:

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