European Roman d’Analyse, The: Unconsummated Love Stories from Boccaccio to Stendhal - Softcover

Kudish, Adele

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501373757 ISBN 13: 9781501373756

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501373757
• ISBN 13: 9781501373756
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 230