Description"Travel Literature and the Development of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century France" follows the evolution of the French novel throughout the eighteenth century by examining the epistemological, aesthetic, and literary exchanges between historiography, travel literature, and the novel, three separate yet intertwined modes of representation that were in the process of creating or recreating their modern identities through a systematization of coherent literary rules. I argue that essential changes in the conceptualization and writing of history led to similar developments in the way travel accounts were written, organized, and consumed. As travel literature strengthened its own generic distinctiveness, novelists depicting foreign characters and/or landscapes selectively appropriated the legitimating discourse of travel literature to create an autonomous literary space for the novel. As these novels emulate travel literature, they critically incorporate the problematic questions of legitimacy of travel accounts, and force the novel's claims of truth to take place within a historical methodology discourse which in turn legitimizes it, delineating distinct profiles for history and fiction alike.