Madame de Lafayette
When, in 2007, the French President scorned the idea that budding public servants should be required to read La Princesse de Cleves, the ensuing protests, whatever their purely political dimension, were a reminder of this work's iconic status. Naturally enough, perhaps, this spotlight left in the shade the other works attributed to Mme de Lafayette. There was also scant reference to the messy question of attribution. With no manuscript in existence the present attribution of La Princesse de Cleves was made ‘definitively’ only a century after its publication in 1678: for example, the 1764 reprint of the 1704 Paris edition cites La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Lafayette, and Segrais as co-authors. Does this matter? True, we would still watch Hamlet if it were performed by the Royal Bacon Company. However, in the case of Mme de Lafayette, biographical details are still often used to shore up critical hypotheses. At the outset, therefore, one issue deserves attention: what does ‘Mme de Lafayette’ now imply?
Maîtrise esthétique de la passion féminine. Fonctionnement topique du pavillon dans La Princesse de Clèves.
When La Princesse de Cleves was published in 1678 it was celebrated as a literary achievement by some readers but criticized by others, in particular by some of the most reknowned and influential critiques of the time Jean-Baptiste Henri du Trousset Valincour and Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, as an attack on the ideals of plausibility and moral decency. It was notably the two scenes known as “The Confession” and “The Dream”, both taking place in the pavilion at the Cleves estate La Coulommiers, that appeared indecent and implausible in the eyes of the two critiques. Taking the multiple symbolique connotations of the pavilion as a starting point, this article will argue that the accusations of implausibility and indecency should be understood as ideological reactions to the novel's negociations of desire, aesthetics and power.
Poetics of reading : approaches to the novel
What happens when we read novels and how do we make sense of them? Inge Wimmers explores these questions by developing a flexible poetics of reading that generously opens up the interpretive space between reader and text, while drawing on current theories of reading and combining rhetorical, pragmatic, and phenomenological approaches. "Poetics," here, is extended beyond the study of purely textual features to structures of exchange between text and reader. In a discussion of four major French novels from the seventeenth century to the present, the author not only sets up a broad-based poetics but also makes important contributions to contemporary issues in the study of narrative. Wimmers introduces the concept of multiple, interlocking frames of reference that allows for the integration of diverse critical perspectives. Analyzing La Princesse de Cleves, Madame Bovary, A la recherche du temps perdu, and Projet pour une revolution a New York, she shows how texts provide some frames of reference, while others are produced by the reader's disposition and cultural milieu.Originally published in 1989.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.