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Author: Thomas DiPiero Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804765804 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 412
Book Description
This book challenges several traditional assumptions about the development of the French novel, notably that the novel is a bourgeois art form that rose and flourished along with the rise of the bourgeoisie; and that the novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were inevitable stepping stones on the road to the apotheosis of realism realized in the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. Instead, the author argues that the early French novel articulated the French aristocracy's claims to natural ascendancy against an encroaching middle class. But like any other literary form, the novel produces and is a product of ideology, and it reveals the contradictions lying beneath the surface of an apparently seamless social structure. After the death of Louis XIV and the resulting social and political redefinition of the aristocracy, the ideological rifts in the novel's form enabled it to shift its class affiliations with the changing times. French cultural life was increasingly tinged with values determined by new configurations in the control and transmission of property, including new constraints on women's sexual behavior. Fiction that claimed for itself a rightful place in the real world began to appear. As it had during the seventeenth century, fiction continued to negotiate complex social contradictions and label as malevolent any person or group that seemed to threaten social order, notably the immoderate woman who flouted traditional conceptions of virtue and threatened to read the social fabric. This new account of the rise of the French novel is enriched throughout by close readings of both well-known and obscure novels, including d'Urfe;'s L'Astre;e, Gomberville's Polexandre, Furetière's Le Roman bourgeois, Pre;vost's Manon Lescaut, Diderot's La Religieuse, and Sade's Justine.
Author: Thomas DiPiero Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804765804 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 412
Book Description
This book challenges several traditional assumptions about the development of the French novel, notably that the novel is a bourgeois art form that rose and flourished along with the rise of the bourgeoisie; and that the novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were inevitable stepping stones on the road to the apotheosis of realism realized in the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. Instead, the author argues that the early French novel articulated the French aristocracy's claims to natural ascendancy against an encroaching middle class. But like any other literary form, the novel produces and is a product of ideology, and it reveals the contradictions lying beneath the surface of an apparently seamless social structure. After the death of Louis XIV and the resulting social and political redefinition of the aristocracy, the ideological rifts in the novel's form enabled it to shift its class affiliations with the changing times. French cultural life was increasingly tinged with values determined by new configurations in the control and transmission of property, including new constraints on women's sexual behavior. Fiction that claimed for itself a rightful place in the real world began to appear. As it had during the seventeenth century, fiction continued to negotiate complex social contradictions and label as malevolent any person or group that seemed to threaten social order, notably the immoderate woman who flouted traditional conceptions of virtue and threatened to read the social fabric. This new account of the rise of the French novel is enriched throughout by close readings of both well-known and obscure novels, including d'Urfe;'s L'Astre;e, Gomberville's Polexandre, Furetière's Le Roman bourgeois, Pre;vost's Manon Lescaut, Diderot's La Religieuse, and Sade's Justine.
Author: Olivier Delers Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1611495822 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 197
Book Description
The rise of the novel paradigm—and the underlying homology between the rise of a bourgeois middle class and the coming of age of a new literary genre—continues to influence the way we analyze economic discourse in the eighteenth-century French novel. Characters are often seen as portraying bourgeois values, even when historiographical evidence points to the virtual absence of a self-conscious and coherent bourgeoisie in France in the early modern period. Likewise, the fact that the nobility was a dynamic and diverse group whose members had learned to think in individualistic and meritocratic terms as a result of courtly politics is often ignored. The Other Rise of the Novel calls for a radical revision of how realism, the language of self-interest and commercial exchanges, and idealized noble values interact in the early modern novel. It focuses on two novels from the seventeenth century, Furetière’s Roman bourgeois and Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves and four novels from the eighteenth century, Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Sade’s Les infortunes de la vertu. It argues that eighteenth-century French fiction does not reflect material culture mimetically and that character action is best analyzed by focusing on the social and discursive exchanges staged by the text, rather than by trying to create parallels between specific behavior and actual historical changes. The novel produces its own reality by transforming characters and their stories into alternative social models, different articulations of how individuals should define their economic relations to others. The representation of interpersonal relations often highlights personal conceptions of private interest that cannot be easily reconciled with the traditional narrative of a transition towards economic modernity. Realism, then, is not only about verisimilar storytelling and psychological depth: it is an epistemological questioning about the type of access to reality that a particular genre can give its readers.
Author: Guido Mazzoni Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674974034 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 403
Book Description
The novel is the most important form of Western art. It aims to represent the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature sends out against the systematic thought of science and philosophy. Indebted to Lukács and Bakhtin, to Auerbach and Ian Watt, Guido Mazzoni’s Theory of the Novel breaks new ground, building a historical understanding of how the novel became the modern book of life: one of the best representations of our experience of the world. The genre arose during a long metamorphosis of narrative forms that took place between 1550 and 1800. By the nineteenth century it had come to encompass a corpus of texts distinguished by their freedom from traditional formal boundaries and by the particularity of their narratives. Mazzoni explains that modern novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever, by narrators who exist—like us—as contingent beings within time and space. They therefore present an interpretation, not a copy, of the world. Novels grant new importance to the stories of ordinary men and women and allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth. As Theory of the Novel makes clear, this art form narrates an epoch and a society in which individual experiences do not converge but proliferate, in which the common world has fragmented into a plurality of small, local worlds, each absolute in its particularity.
Author: Nora Martin Peterson Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 164453035X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 154
Book Description
Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and text—three categories whose mutual boundaries this book seeks to soften—but also, in their very messiness, participate in defining them. Involuntary Confessions capitalizes on the uncertainty of such volatile moments, arguing that it is instability itself that provides the tools to navigate and understand the complexity of the early modern world. Rather than locate the body within any one discourse (Foucauldian, psychoanalytic), this book argues that slips of the flesh create a liminal space not exactly outside of discourse, but not necessarily subject to it, either. Involuntary confessions of the flesh reveal the perpetual and urgent challenge of early modern thinkers to textually confront and define the often tenuous relationship between the body and the self. By eluding and frustrating attempts to contain it, the early modern body reveals that truth is as much about surfaces as it is about interior depth, and that the self is fruitfully perpetuated by the conflict that proceeds from seemingly irreconcilable narratives. Interdisciplinary in its scope, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France pairs major French literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (by Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Madame de Lafayette) with cultural documents (confession manuals, legal documents about the application of torture, and courtly handbooks). It is the first study of its kind to bring these discourses into thematic (rather than linear or chronological) dialog. In so doing, it emphasizes the shared struggle of many different early modern conversations to come to terms with the body’s volatility. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Author: Richard Terdiman Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801885433 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
In Body and Story, Richard Terdiman explores the tension between what might seem to be two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: as physical reality and as representation in language. In demonstrating the complicated relationship between these two modes of being, he also presents a new bold approach to the problem of conflicts between irreconcilable but equally compelling theoretical ideas. Enlightenment rationalism is most often understood as maintaining that words can meaningfully refer to and grasp things in the material world, while Postmodernism famously argues that nothing exists outside of language. Terdiman challenges this clean distinction, finding the early seeds of Postmodern doubt in the Enlightenment, and demonstrating the stubborn resistance of material reality—particularly that of the body—to language even today. Building on readings of works by 18th-century encyclopedist Denis Diderot and contemporary philosopher-icon Jacques Derrida, Terdiman argues that despite their genuine and profound opposition, a constant negotiation or mutual interrogation has always been taking place between these two world-views, even as the balance at times shifts to one side or the other. In analyzing these shifts he proposes a new model for understanding how seemingly unabridgeable theories legitimately coexist in our intellectual conception of the world, and he suggests a new ethics for managing this coexistence.
Author: Jotham Parsons Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801454980 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Coinage and currency—abstract and socially created units of value and power—were basic to early modern society. By controlling money, the people sought to understand and control their complex, expanding, and interdependent world. In Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France, Jotham Parsons investigates the creation and circulation of currency in France. The royal Cour des Monnaies centralized monetary administration, expanding its role in the emerging modern state during the sixteenth century and assuming new powers as an often controversial repository of theoretical and administrative expertise. The Cour des Monnaies, Parsons shows, played an important role in developing the contemporary understanding of money, as a source of both danger and opportunity at the center of economic and political life. More practically, the Monnaies led generally successful responses to the endemic inflation of the era and the monetary chaos of a period of civil war. Its work investigating and prosecuting counterfeiters shone light into a picaresque world of those who used the abstract and artificial nature of money for their own ends. Parsons’s broad, multidimensional portrait of money in early modern France also encompasses the literature of the age, in which money’s arbitrary and dangerous power was a major theme.
Author: Lynn Festa Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801889340 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 311
Book Description
In this ambitious and original study, Lynn Festa examines how and why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of representing British and French relations with colonial populations in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Festa shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of identity in an age of empire. Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self. Placed in conversation with empire, however, sentimentality invites both psychological and cultural readings of the encounter between self and other. Sentimental texts, Festa claims, enabled readers to create powerful imagined relations to distant people. Yet these emotional bonds simultaneously threatened the boundaries between self and other, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. Festa argues that sentimental tropes and figures allowed readers to feel for others, while maintaining the particularity of the individual self. Sentimental identification thus operated as a form of differentiation as well as consolidation. Festa contends that global reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp during this era. Sentimentality became an important tool for writers on empire, allowing conquest to be portrayed as commerce and scenes of violence and exploitation to be converted into displays of benevolence and pity. Above all, sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling helped to define who would be recognized as human.
Author: T. Bowers Publisher: Springer ISBN: 113701461X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
Innovative and multidisciplinary, this collection of essays marks out the future of Atlantic Studies, making visible the emphases and purposes now emerging within this vital comparative field. The contributors model new ways to understand the unexpected roles that seduction stories and sentimental narratives played for readers struggling to negotiate previously unimagined differences between and among people, institutions, and ideas.
Author: Charlotte Daniels Publisher: Bucknell University Press ISBN: 9780838754108 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
"Drawing on Habermas and Freud as well as historians of the family, Daniels takes up the case of three women novelists each writing at a key moment in the parallel development of the novel genre and the modern family. She demonstrates that these writers - confronted with ever more reified exclusion from public life, and relegated to narrowly defined domestic roles - intervened in and subverted the process in their novels. Daniels shows that women writers used the novel first to imagine different social rules that might define alternative kinship systems (Graffigny), and later to find - and create - loopholes within a firmly entrenched system of official and unofficial law (Charriere and Sand)." "Spanning a crucial period in the emergence of modernity, this interdisciplinary study addresses problems in French literary and social history, gender studies, and the history of mentalites."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Thomas DiPiero
Author: Thomas DiPiero
Author: Olivier Delers
Author: Guido Mazzoni
Author: Nora Martin Peterson
Author: Richard Terdiman
Author: Jotham Parsons
Author: Lynn Festa
Author: T. Bowers
Author: Sylvie Romanowski
Author: Charlotte Daniels