L'esprit romanesque: Fiction, epistemology, and gender in France and England, 1641--1688.
Item
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Title
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L'esprit romanesque: Fiction, epistemology, and gender in France and England, 1641--1688.
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Identifier
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AAI3083677
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identifier
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3083677
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Creator
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Jones, Charlotte Rebecca.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Clare Carroll
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, English | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines both fictional and theoretical texts in France and England between 1641 and 1688 that express ideas about the function and value of prose fiction. I argue that the epistemological value of fiction was under revision during the period, and that this becomes clear when fiction and its theoretical elaborations are read for their engagement with both historical and natural philosophical discourse. Instead of being consistently opposed to "history" and "natural philosophy," fiction was seen to be a useful and relevant mode for examining the epistemological concerns of the period. The texts under review reflect an engagement with questions of epistemology, and this engagement is expressed by and within constructions of gender. This trio of concerns---fiction, epistemology, and gender---intersect and are shown to be mutually constitutive in these texts that cross national, disciplinary, and discursive boundaries.;The Introduction discusses approaches that construe the seventeenth century as a time of crisis or change---semiotic, scientific, or historiographical---in order to demonstrate how and where my own approach intervenes. It also introduces the structuring concepts of the dissertation and how they will be used: fiction, gender, and epistemology. Chapter One examines the preface to Madeleine de Scudery's Ibrahim (1641) and Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678) in France and various English translations of French heroic romance (1653--1660) and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) in England; Chapter Two examines two English fictional narratives, Walter Charleton's The Ephesian Matron (1659?) and Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (1656); Chapter Three is a close reading of Pierre-Daniel Huet's Lettre sur l'origine des romans (1670). The Conclusion offers a reading of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes (1686) and Behn's translation (1688) of it. All the chapters illustrate my argument that fictional discourse exploits and articulates the changing ideas about epistemology, and that it does so by also exploiting and articulating ideas about gender.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
