SOURCE: "Social Realism in the Dialogue of Eighteenth-Century French Fiction," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 6, edited by Ronald C. Rosbottom, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1977, pp. 265-84.

In the following essay, Mylne explores the trend toward increased use of realistic dialogue in French fiction of the eighteenth century.

One element of French novels which shows a marked change during the eighteenth century is that of dialogue. The simplest and most obvious way of describing the change is to say that, in a significant number of novels, dialogue becomes more "realistic" in manner and presentation: the style of conversations in a work by Balzac is more like the way people talk in real life than is, say, the dialogue style of La Princesse de Clèves. However, once we try to go beyond simplistic statements of this kind, the criterion of "realism" becomes less satisfactory. There are problems...