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''Julie, or the New Heloise'' ((フランス語:Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse)) is an epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published in 1761 by Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam. The original edition was entitled ''Lettres de deux amans habitans d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes'' ("Letters from two lovers living in a small town at the foot of the Alps"). The novel's subtitle points to the history of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abelard, a medieval story of passion and Christian renunciation. The novel was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Although Rousseau wrote it as a novel, a philosophical theory about authenticity permeates through it, as he explores autonomy and authenticity as moral values. A common interpretation is that Rousseau valued the ethics of authenticity over rational moral principles, as he illustrates the principle that one should do what is imposed upon him by society only insofar as it would seem congruent with one's "secret principles" and feelings, being constituent of one's core identity. Thus unauthentic behavior would pave the way to self-destruction. Arthur Schopenhauer cited ''Julie, or the New Heloise'' as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, Wilhelm Meister, and Don Quixote. ==Reception == Historian Robert Darnton has argued that ''Julie'' "was perhaps the biggest best-seller of the century".〔Darnton, Robert. ''The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History''. New York: Viking (1984), 242.〕 Publishers could not print copies fast enough so they rented the book out by the day and even by the hour. According to Darnton, there were at least 70 editions in print before 1800, "probably more than for any other novel in the previous history of publishing."〔Darnton, 242.〕 But what was truly astonishing regarding ''Julie''s popularity was not just its sales statistics, but the emotions it brought out in its readers. Readers were so overcome that they wrote to Rousseau in droves, creating the first celebrity author.〔Darnton, 243-4.〕 One reader claimed that the novel nearly drove him mad from excess of feeling while another claimed that the violent sobbing he underwent cured his cold. Reader after reader describes their "tears", "sighs", "torments" and "ecstasies" to Rousseau.〔Darnton, 242-3.〕 One wrote in a letter to Rousseau after finishing the novel:
Like this reader, people became deeply invested in the lives of the characters in the novel, to an extent that was entirely new in fiction. In fact, some readers simply could not accept that the book was fiction. One woman wrote to Rousseau asking:
Other readers identified less with the individual characters and more with their general struggles. They saw in ''Julie'' a story of temptation, sin and redemption that resembled their own lives.〔Darnton, 246-7.〕 The success of ''Julie'' delighted Rousseau; he took pleasure in narrating a story about how a lady ordered a horse carriage to go to an Opera, and then picked up Julie only to continue reading the book till the next morning. So many women wrote to him offering their love that he speculated there was not a single high society woman with whom he would not have succeeded if he wanted to. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Julie, or the New Heloise」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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