Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, "Zayde" is both the swan song of a literary tradition nearly two thousand years old and a harbinger of the modern psychological novel. "Zayde" unfolds during the long medieval struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula; Madame de Lafayette (1634-93) takes the reader on a Mediterranean tour typical of classical and seventeenth-century romances from Catalonia to Cyprus and back again with battles, prophecies, and shipwrecks dotting the crisscrossed paths of the book...
Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, "Zayde" is both the swan song of a literary tradition near...
The familiar classical France of splendor, formalism, and conquest had a hidden double, one ruled by the cultural imperative to "be interior," to look inside oneself and to write about what one found. Being Interior explores how seventeenth-century readers and writers busied themselves with the pressing task of inventing a text commensurate with these newly opened subjective depths. Their practices laid the groundwork not only for the future success of autobiography as a genre but also for our entire modern culture of interiority.
In tracing the emergence of autobiography as a...
The familiar classical France of splendor, formalism, and conquest had a hidden double, one ruled by the cultural imperative to "be interior," to l...
