Scudéry, Madeleine de | Joan DeJean (essay date 1989)
Joan DeJean (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: “The Politics of Genre: Madeleine de Scudéry and the Rise of the French Novel,” in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 29, No. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 43-51.
[In the following essay, DeJean argues that Artamène was a response to contemporary political events. As such, she suggests, Scudéry's work helps demonstrate how the novel as a genre was a response to the French political climate of the seventeenth century.]
Historians and literary historians have for some time asserted that the earliest types of prose fiction developed in 17th-century France played a central role “in the development and diffusion of feminist ideas.”1 Without exception, the strains of prose fiction in which today's readers would recognize the emerging modern novel were the creation of women writers, a literary fact the theoretician Huet underscored as early as 1670 in a lengthy preface to Lafayette's Zayde. It...
[The entire page is 4183 words long]
Navigate
