vraisemblance

Vraisemblance does not entail “realism” in the sense that Ian Watt gives it in The Rise of the Novel. It is not the “realistic particularity” ([1957] 1974, 17) of the processes of experience, as Watt defines his “formal realism.” Rather, vraisemblance takes the guise of “elegant concentration,” not typical of the novel in Watt’s account (30).

2017, Karin Kukkonen, A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel, page 6

The notion of vraisemblance, “in whose name all the literary battles were fought, is at the root of all criticism” (Bray 1931, 192; c'est en son nom que se livrent toutes les batailles littéraires, elle est à la base de toutes les critiques). Derived from Aristotle’s “probable,” in the rediscovery of the Poetics in Renaissance Italy, vraisemblance takes the key hierarchical position in seventeenth-century neoclassicism (see Duprat 2009) and maintains it until well into the eighteenth century (see Kremer 2011).

2017, Karin Kukkonen, A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel, page 6