Lesage, Alain-René | Walter E. Rex (essay date 1987)
Walter E. Rex (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: "Crispin's Inventions," in The Attraction of the Contrary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 73-82.
[In the following essay, Rex investigates the role of vraisemblance—or the appearance of truth—in Crispin, Rival of His Master, proposing that "the whole text is a forgery to make us believe in ersatz imitations."]
Even before Hegel had given the theme such a grandiose philosophical setting in his Phenomenology, numerous individuals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been aware of the special importance of the master-slave (valet) relationship for the literature of Enlightenment, and today it has become a commonplace of theatrical criticism to cite the developing drama one observes in the social oppositions, as one goes from Molière to Beaumarchais, that is, from the fascinating...
[The entire page is 4956 words long]
Navigate
