A Taste for the Foreign examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot's 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine
Galland's early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. Concentrating on the most successful examples of some of the most important sub-genres of prose fiction in the long
seventeenth century--heroic romances, shorter urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages--the book examines how these types of fiction creatively appropriate the scientific or
documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places.
