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List of contents
Acknowledgments
An Introduction to Analytical Fiction
1. The Unconsummated Life in Boccaccio’s Elegia di madonna Fiammetta
2. Link on Link: The “Chain of Dishonor” in Marguerite’s Novella 10 and Cervantes’s “El curioso impertinente”
3. Sign Seeing and Failures of Mind Reading in La Princesse de Clèves
4. Self as the “Grand Misleader” in Clarissa and The History of Sir Charles Grandison
5. Silence and the Cruel Gaze of Society: Austen’s Persuasion and Stendhal’s Armance
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Adele Kudish is Associate Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, USA. Her research focuses on 17th- and 18th-century proto-psychological fiction, particularly the impossibility of self-knowledge in unconsummated love stories. She has published articles in Studies in Philology and The French Review, among others.
Summary
Through close readings of a selection of European novels and novellas written between 1340 and 1827, this study of "analytical fiction" examines how unconsummated love stories probe the frailty of self-knowledge. Tracing elements of what the French call the roman d'analyse in the works of Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Cervantes, Marie de Lafayette, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Stendhal, Adele Kudish discusses how the metaphor of unconsummated love is deployed to represent a fundamental lack of insight into the self.
Rather than depicting the mind as transparent, analytical fiction deals in the opacity of the mind. Narrators and characters are faced with deception, misprision, doubt, and confusion, leading to self-deception, jealousy, and crises of self. The European Roman d’Analyse reads such epistemological failures as symptoms of a more fundamental preoccupation with the human psyche as un-chartable and bizarre. In this way, the authors of romans d'analyse enact a larger philosophical project: an anatomy of the psyche wherein we are unable—or unwilling—to know ourselves.
Foreword
Through the framework of the European roman d'analyse, this book examines unconsummated love stories from 1340 to 1827 that probe the frailty of human self-knowledge.
Additional text
[A] well-researched and wide-ranging study … Kudish situations and describes the roman d’analyse as a subgenre within literary history that has its roots in a long tradition of philosophical scepticism and which can fruitfully be approached from comparatist and narratological perspectives. … The parallel readings offered by this book can enrich our understanding of canonical French texts … [and] the book’s ‘pan-European’ approach, which looks beyond national literary traditions and conventional chronological divisions to seek out connections between works that place disconnection at their centres, is enough in itself to make this book a valuable addition to scholarship.
