From Romance to Novel: 17th-Century French Fiction

Modern literary historians aren't the only ones to have had difficulty conceptualizing the novel without using romance as a foil: lexically, the opposition has been with us, in France and England, for a good three and a half centuries; the tension even generated, many say, the foundational Don Quixote. In this seminar, we will be both reviewing the critical literature on the topic and looking closely at three works from the French tradition that may—or may not—document the transition from romance to novel: d'Urfé's L'Astrée, Sorel's Le Berger extravagant, and Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves.