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6 - Madame de Lafayette and La Princesse de Clèves as Landmark

from Part I - Beginnings: From the Late Medieval to Madame de Lafayette

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

A landmark orients, signals a turning point, indicates a boundary. Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) was immediately recognized, both by those who disliked it and those who appreciated it, as announcing a new approach to plot structure, representation of society, plausibility (or its lack), and character development. Later the terms ‘psychology’ and ‘analysis’ were used to point to the narrative’s approach to portraying the feelings and thoughts of the protagonist. One of the most obvious ways in which the text distinguishes itself from other novels of its period is its brevity. This quality gives it particular staying-power as a landmark, making it useful in school curricula as an example of the literature of its period—though this use risks skewing the view of seventeenth-century novels by presenting a striking, innovative exception, as the norm. Because landmarks indicate boundaries, they can serve as symbols of the territories they define. La Princesse de Clèves serves today as a marker of the cultural tradition of France itself. It is thus at the centre of debates about the literary canon and of national identity. For both the seventeenth century and for the twenty-first, Lafayette’s work fuels debate.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Beasley, Faith Evelyn, Revising Memory: Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990)Google Scholar
Campbell, John, ‘Etat Présent: Madame de Lafayette’, French Studies, 65 (2011), 225–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delers, Olivier, The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2015)Google Scholar
Fabre, Jean, L’Art de l’analyse dans la Princesse de Clèves (Paris: Ophrys, 1970)Google Scholar
François, Anne-Lise, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar
Goodkin, Richard E., How Do I Know Thee? Theatrical and Narrative Cognition in Seventeenth-Century France (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015)Google Scholar
Henry, Patrick (ed.), An Inimitable Example: The Case for the Princesse de Clèves (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982)Google Scholar
Jensen, Katharine Ann, Uneasy Possessions: The Mother–Daughter Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671–1928 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011)Google Scholar
Lafayette, Marie Madeleine de, The Princess of Cleves, trans. and ed. by Lyons, John D. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993)Google Scholar
Lafayette, Marie Madeleine de, Œuvres Complètes, ed. by Esmein-Sarrazin, Camille (Paris: Gallimard, 2014)Google Scholar
Lyons, John D., The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012)Google Scholar
Merlin-Kajman, Hélène, ‘Peut-on sauver ce qu’on a détruit?’, Le Débat, 159 (2010), 91Google Scholar

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