The European Roman d'Analyse
Unconsummated Love Stories from Boccaccio to Stendhal
- 240 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
Through close readings of a selection of European novels and novellas written between 1340 and 1827, this study of "analytical fiction" examines how unconsummated love stories probe the frailty of self-knowledge. Tracing elements of what the French call the roman d'analyse in the works of Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Cervantes, Marie de Lafayette, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Stendhal, Adele Kudish discusses how the metaphor of unconsummated love is deployed to represent a fundamental lack of insight into the self. Rather than depicting the mind as transparent, analytical fiction deals in the opacity of the mind. Narrators and characters are faced with deception, misprision, doubt, and confusion, leading to self-deception, jealousy, and crises of self. The European Roman d'Analyse reads such epistemological failures as symptoms of a more fundamental preoccupation with the human psyche as un-chartable and bizarre. In this way, the authors of romans d'analyse enact a larger philosophical project: an anatomy of the psyche wherein we are unable-or unwilling-to know ourselves.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Halftitle
- Title Page
- ContentsÂ
- Acknowledgments
- An Introduction to Analytical Fiction
- 1 The Unconsummated Life in Boccaccioâs Elegia di madonna Fiammetta
- 2 Link on Link: The âChain of Dishonorâ in Margueriteâs Novella 10 and Cervantesâs âEl curioso impertinenteâ
- 3 Sign Seeing and Failures of Mind Reading in Lafayetteâs La Princesse de Clèves
- 4 Self as the âGrand Misleaderâ in Richardsonâs Clarissa and The History of Sir Charles Grandison
- 5 Silence and the Cruel Gaze of Society: Austenâs Persuasion and Stendhalâs Armance
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
- Imprint