Narrative Transformations from L'Astrée to Le Berger extravagant

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Contents

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pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-

I would first of all like to thank Dalia Judovitz for her guidance and friendship since the very beginning of this project. She inspired me to study early modern fictions, and continued to encourage me beyond graduate studies. I am very grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University for the Summer Faculty Fellowship that ...

Introduction

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pp. 1-13

The two works imitate moribund literary traditions: ancient and Renaissance pastoral, medieval chivalric and courtly scenarios, Neoplatonist and Neo-Petrarchist verse. Like tombs, they enshrine and commemorate dying literary conventions at the end of an era. Yet they do promise rebirth and renewal at the dawn of the century. They can be called transformational narratives ...

Chapter One. Echoes of Desire and Intention: The Mirroring of Utterances in Romance and Antiromance

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pp. 14-34

Both d’Urfé and Sorel transform conventions that ancient, medieval, and Renaissance writers employed to express intention and desire in language: echoes, galimatias, and rhetorical citations. In the following analyses, we will witness the transformation of literary convention on the basic level of the utterance in a study of a long-standing mode of poetic expression: ...

Chapter Two. Verbal Travesty and Disguise: Parody and Citation of Typified Languages

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pp. 35-57

Two other devices employed by d’Urfé and Sorel to explore the problem of transforming literary language are verbal travesty and disguise. As in the use made by the two authors of echoing and discursive practices from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, their respective approaches to the ...

Chapter Three. Debates of Convention and Debates on Convention

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pp. 58-79

Instances of debate pervade d’Urfé’s L’Astrée and Sorel’s Le berger extravagant. Both authors borrow components of ancient rhetoric, medieval amorous debate, and the Renaissance revival of Ciceronian and Senecan oration to inform plot. Yet the epistemological status of polemics within the Baroque ...

Chapter Four. Experiments with Multiple Agency and Intention through Emblematics

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pp. 80-99

The emblem’s combination of verbal and visual elements brings into play problems of multiple agency and intention similar to those posed by verbal travesty, disguise, and debate. Because the emblem interrelates representation and interpretation, allegory and allegorical hermeneutics ...

Chapter Five. Transvestism and Specularity: Transformations and Travesties of the Self

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pp. 100-125

D’Urfé and Sorel do not arbitrarily couple the themes of mirroring and transvestism. Both themes involve the perception of a physical appearance meant to designate an identity, a self. These two themes of figuring the self have been commonplaces in Western literature since Apollodorus, ...

Chapter Six. D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs: The Question of the Death and Birth of Literature

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pp. 126-147

These narratives raise specific questions regarding conventional modes of representation that inform narration: the difficulties of establishing identity through gender characterization, speech, love debate, and emblematic representation. In both works, the tomb serves as the figure of a retrospective account. ...

Conclusion: Narrative Transformations and Critical Appraisal

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pp. 148-160

It is therefore a transitional text between centuries. Moreover, d’Urfé creates a self-reflective text, that is, a romance that repeats and echoes its own conventions in permutations of transformation. He has characters such as Hylas and Fleurial mimic and deform the words of their social and moral superiors. This echo effect adds to the romance’s textual polyphony ...

Appendix of Images

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pp. 161-164

Notes

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pp. 165-180

Bibliography

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pp. 181-194

Index

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pp. 195-203