Page - 242 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

242 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Daniel Winkler | Mobile Bildinventare — Extended Abstract This text can be described as a ‘mobile’ pastiche: at the beginning of the narration, set in a bucolic region not far from Paris, Regnard presents Cléomède (the narrator of the adventures of Zelmis) and her troupe of aristocratic and gallant women. In this way, he makes use of a narra- tive framework that was common in early modern collections of French novellas. In the same way, Zelmis’s embedded story brings together a popular ‘repertoire’ of mobile topoi, combining the love story of the married title character, the Provencal Elvire, and Zelmis with a ‘misguided’ Grand Tour between Southern France and Italy. Thus, common places of tender affection and unhappy love are fused with inventories of cross-Mediterranean voyages and privateering, abduction and enslavement, leading all of the protagonists to Algiers. In other words, Regnard’s pastiche narrates a story of intercontinental mobility, but by doing so he refers continuously to mobile literary patterns and cultural commonplaces, espe- cially those of late 17th-century France. The various intermedial references that constitute the hybrid pastiche The Provencal are reminiscent of contemporary travel literature and Barbary Coast narratives, but also of the gallant novels of famous salonnières (such as de Scudéry and de La Fayette) and the French classic plays of Corneille and Molière. By referring to well-known genres, authors and texts, the libertine Regnard satirizes the popular refinement of behaviour and language and the cultivation of tender feelings. He also points to his own life and writing by paraphrasing his extensive voyages, which led him as far as Stockholm and Tornø, the North Pole and Lapland. Demonstrating both his affluence and a certain wry self-deprecation, he reflects in this way on the contemporary penchant for peripheral destinations and eccentric, lonely voyages. Although the literary coherence of The Provencal, last edited in the 1960s, can be questio- ned (at least its last highly condensed and crude passages), its interest clearly lies in its utterly hybrid and sketchy character. As an oscillating pastiche, the text is, at the intersection between intermediality, canon and trans-area studies, a highly interesting basis for a contextualized ana- lysis pointing at aesthetic and generic, but also spatial and cultural, crossroad issues. As a nar- rative situated on the edge of historical epochs and knowledge, it represents a corpus of hybrid texts from the 17th and the 18th century. These texts, which are created by intermeshing diffe- rent inventories of images, provide new forms and histories. In the sense of a ‘laboratory’ of the early modern period, cross-Mediterranean narratives such as The Provencal can be understood as thematic and structural precursors of texts that discuss questions of privateering, abduc- tion and enslavement against the backdrop of imperialism and colonialism in other parts of the world and at other times. By negotiating fundamental questions of historical and cultural alterity, these texts provide a creative reservoir of mobile narratives which, at the same time, provide a critical view of contemporary phenomena related to areal transfers in a world of global transformations.