French and Francophone Studies - A Research Guide to Resources: Seventeenth Century - Books

This book seeks to understand what imagination meant in early modern Europe, particularly in early modern France, before the Romantic era gave the term its modern meaning. The author explores the themes surrounding early modern notions of imagination (including hostility to imagination) through the writings of such figures as Descartes, Montaigne, François de Sales, Pascal, the Marquise de Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette, and Fénelon.

Tracing its paradoxical nature back to Aristotle's Rhetoric, Lyons shows how exemplary rhetoric is caught between often competing aims of persuasive general statement and accurate representation. In French and Italian texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this dual task was rendered still more challenging by a transition to new sources of examples as the age of discovery brought increased emphasis on observation. The writers of this period were aware of a crisis in exemplary rhetoric, a situation in which serious questions were raised about how authors and audience would find a common ground in interpreting representative instances. Lyons's focus on the strategy of example leads to new readings of six major writers--Machiavelli, Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Pascal, Descartes, and Marie de Lafayette. Originally published in 1990.

Challenging the view of epistolary narrative as a faulty precursor to the nineteenth-century realist novel, Elizabeth MacArthur argues that the openness and flexibility that characterize correspondences, both real and fictional, reflect the preoccupations of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her readings of the Lettres portugaises, Mme du Deffand's correspondence with Horace Walpole, and Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse propose an alternative to closure-oriented theories of narrative as they uncover an interplay between two forces: a tendency towards closure and meaning (metaphor) and a tendency towards openness and desire (metonymy). (…) By juxtaposing real and fictional epistolary works, MacArthur reveals the similarities between the two, particularly their "extravagance": ambiguity, openness, and forward-moving energy. Originally published in 1990.

Interpretation in/of the Seventeenth Century explores interpretation according to, and by, the seventeenth century, namely how intellectuals and officials conceived of interpretation, and how they read their world and its relationship to the past, and of the seventeenth century. As such, the volume examines both temporal relationships, such as current interpretations of the seventeenth century or interpretation of itself and the past by the seventeenth century, and transversal relations, including practices of reading, crossings from one genre to another, and translation. The comparative conception underlying the collection's three main sections ("Culture and Interpretation", "Interpretation and Literature", and "Shifts and Perspectives") allows for an in-depth examination of what could be meant in seventeenth-century France by interpretation - between exegesis and translation - and what interpretive practices characterized the culture of the period.

What influence did René Descartes' concept of mind-body dualism have on early modern conceptions of the self? (…) The Matter of Mind presents studies drawn from a range of disciplines and examines the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, the drama of Pierre Corneille, and the theology of Blaise Pascal. Braider argues that if early modern thought converged on a single model, then it was the experimental picture based on everyday experience proposed by Descartes' skeptical adversary, Michel de Montaigne.

Actes de la conférence. Colloque tenu à Québec les 5 et 6 mai 2005 à l'Université Laval dans le cadre du cinquim̈e colloque "Jeunes chercheurs" du Cercle interuniversitaire d'étude sur la République des Lettres (CIERL).

Allison Stedman makes a case for the rococo as a seventeenth-century literary phenomenon that provided an aesthetic and ideological counterpoint to the emergence of the classical-baroque style and the rise of French political absolutism. Tracing the rococo's evolution over the course the seventeenth century, and exploring its radicalization during the 1670s, 80s and 90s, the study unearths the rococo's counter-vision for the origins and trajectory.

This book, spanning the years 1650-1730 in France and England, looks primarily at the history of literary criticism during that period in order to show how the rising interest in the sublime pushes literary critics to entirely alter their approach to theorizing works of literature. Several literary critics in France and England, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries (Dominique Bouhours, Nicolas Boileau, Ren Rapin, John Dennis, and the abbé Dubos) believed that literature could deliver truths that transcend our world and were analogous or even equal to the truths of divine revelation. Ann Delehanty argues that this shift towards the transcendental realm pushed the definition of the literary work away from describing its objective properties and towards its effects on the mind of the reader. The book provides a new approach to understanding how eighteenth-century aesthetic theories are indebted to seventeenth-century religious, philosophical, and literary ideas.

The Art of Instruction: Pedagogy and Literature in 17th-Century France aims to add a new dimension to the scholarly discussion on how culture is inculcated by focusing on the interplay between aesthetic forms and pedagogical agendas. The nine essays in the collection take into account the full range of meanings associated with the term art: science, method, learning, beautiful expression, artistic creation. In exploring the role art plays in shaping an instructional system, the volume¿s contributors examine literary genres that are both established (comedies, tragedies, sonnets) and nascent (novels, manuals, gazettes) as well as the works of a diverse group of seventeenth-century writers: Chassignet, Subligny, Scarron, Lafayette, La Bruyère, Maintenon, de Visé, Boursault, Molière and Racine. What emerges from this diversity is an invaluable exploration of how educational imperatives, no matter their focus, rely as much on manipulating artistic forms as they do on articulating didactic principles. Broad in its scope while remaining thematically coherent, The Art of Instruction will be of interest to students and scholars of early modern French literature, history, culture and pedagogy.

Drawing upon current theoretical work in gender studies, cultural history, and literary criticism, Harth looks at how women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France attempted to overcome gender barriers and participated in the shaping of rational discourse.

This book comprises essays on the construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. (…) The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice.

Book's Contents: « 1 » Seventeenth-Century Guides to Interaction -- « 2 » Excess and Euphoria in Madeleine de Scudéry's "Conversations" -- « 3 » History, Social Identity, Talk: The Writings of Bussy-Rabutin -- « 4 » Sociability and Intimacy in the Letters of Madame de Sévigné -- « 5 » Teaching Sociability Through Literature: The Works of Edme Boursault -- Afterword -- Selected Bibliography -- Index

Between 1540 and 1580, authors such as Speroni, Tullia d'Aragona, the Venetian poligrafi, Tyard, Le Caron, Pasquier, Taillemont, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labé, feature interlocutors not only deliberating on love but imitating the experience of love in their dynamics of speaking. These love dialogues allow early modern ideologies and discourses of love to be imitated by the reader and rival lyric poetry in conveying amorous experience, validating dialogue as an authentic literary form rather than a tool of philosophical thinking.

Travel narratives were the principal source of knowledge about the lands of the Near East and the Indian Ocean Basin in 17th-century France. Claiming the authority of first-hand observation, they paradoxically rely for their legitimization on the tropes of an established literary tradition. The status of these texts remained ambiguous, not least because of their anecdotal depictions of great riches, brutality or sexual promise. (…) this book questions the feasibility of cultural representation through travel, exploring a large corpus of original sources written by French ecclesiastics, gentlemen-travellers, ambassadors and adventurers. Linguistic, religious, cultural or geographical barriers meant most travellers remained distanced from the peoples about whom they would simultaneously become authoritative. (…)The 'Oriental' that emerges is a supremely variable entity, alternately naked or veiled, barbaric or civilized, menacing or attractive.

This book examines questions of self-construction in the works of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier (1627-1693), the wealthiest unmarried woman in Europe at the time, a pro-women advocate, author of memoirs, letters and novels, and the commissioner of four châteaux and other buildings throughout France, including Saint-Fargeau, Champigny-sur-Veude, Eu, and Choisy-le-roi. An NEH-funded project, this study explores the interplay between writing and the symbolic import of châteaux to examine Montpensier’s strategies to establish herself as a woman with autonomy and power in early modern France.

The first book-length presentation of Roger Chartier's work in English, this volume provides a vivid example of the new directions of cultural history in France. These essays probe the impact of printing on all social classes of the Ancien Régime and reveal the surprising range of ways in which texts and pictures were used by audiences with different levels of literacy. Professor Chartier demonstrates that those who attempted to regulate behavior and thought on behalf of church or state, for example, were well aware of the wide influence of the printed word. He finds fascinating evidence of fundamental processes of social control in texts such as the guides to a good death or the treatises on norms of civility, rules that originated at court but that were eventually appropriated in various forms by society as a whole. Essays on the evolution on the fete, on the cahiers de doléances of 1789, and on the early paperback genre known as the Bibliotheque bleue complete the picture of what people read and why and of what was published and what influenced the publishers. These essays offer a critical reappraisal of the complex connections between the new culture of print and the oral and ritual-oriented forms of traditional culture. The reader will discover essential patterns of the cultural evolution of France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

French Renaissance and Baroque Drama helps us rethink pressing issues of the day, such as war, possession, sacrifice, religious conversion, law, and gender. This volume includes essays that employ a range of cutting-edge approaches to elucidate questions such as the social, religious, legal, and political functions of drama, how the staged body transmits emotions to the audience, and the ways in which drama creates communities of inclusion and exclusion, especially during times of conflict.

From 1680 until the French Revolution, when legislation abolished restrictions on theatrical enterprise, a single theatre held sole proprietorship of Molière's works. After 1791, his plays were performed in new theatres all over Paris by new actors, before audiences new to his works. Both his plays and his image took on new dimensions. In Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife, Mechele Leon convincingly demonstrates how revolutionaries challenged the ties that bound this preeminent seventeenth-century comic playwright to the Old Regime…

In Passing Judgment, Hélène Bilis examines how an overlooked character-type--the royal judge--remained a constant of the tragic genre throughout the 17th century although the specifics of his role and position fluctuated as playwrights experimented with changing models of sovereignty onstage. Her readings analyze how this royal decision-maker stood at the intersection of political and theatrical debates and evolved through a process of trial and error in which certain portrayals of kingship were deemed obsolete and were discarded, while others were promoted as culturally allowable and resonant. In tracing the royal judge's persistent presence and transformation, Bilis argues that we can better grasp the weighty political stakes of theatrical representations under the ancien régime.