ABSTRACT
Tolle, lege. This book is the result of a number of intellectual coincidences. It began as a chance encounter with an unprepossessing little volume in a poor nineteenth-century binding, found whilst browsing in a bookshop on the avenue Henri-Julien in Montreal. It was the title that first caught my eye: Le Roman bourgeois. As I was at that time thinking about Daniel Defoe, often considered (by English literary historians in the tradition of Ian Watt at least) to be the first genuine novelist thanks in part to his serious and essentially bourgeois concern ‘with the daily lives of ordinary people’, 1 my curiosity was piqued. I pulled the book off the shelf and read the preface.
