A culture of exile: Fiction by women in seventeenth-century France.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Cherbuliez, Juliette, 1970-

Contributor:

Dejean, Jean, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women's studies.

Europe--History.

Europe.

History.

Romance-language literature.

Comparative literature.

0295.

0313.

0335.

0453.

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

0295.

0313.

0335.

0453.

Physical Description:

246 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 60-07A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

The history of the novel under Louis XIV reveals a persistent historical and tropological link between the institution of exile and the formation of the novel. As a socio-political institution, exile was critical to the evolution of Louis XIV's absolutist culture. Nobles at court experienced the phenomenon of exile and its disciplinary effects, whether through their own banishment or the negative example of a disgraced peer. Even as exile created geographic and cultural boundaries which strengthened monarchical control over the lives of its subjects, it also produced opportunities for opposition on the edges of court society. Throughout the century, women writers contrasted the involuntary marginalization of exile with the confined sphere of the court, envisioning in exile spaces of both social and geographic freedom. In the hands of these women, the novel is not just about exile, however, but is born in exile, to be structured around political forms of exile, and to celebrate the same spaces---geographical and social---that exile forms. This historical context was the basis for the increasingly complex portrait of the political subject that exilic novels offered. To outline the evolution of the French novel as it interacts with the politics and culture of Louis XIV's France, I have chosen three moments in which exile contributed to the development of the novel and produced critiques of the current political climate. In Chapter 1, I examine how the culture-in-exile created by Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orleans, duchesse de Montpensier, in the 1650s and 1660s, was the birthplace of the novel and the origin of the genre's exilic values. Chapter 2 explores Montpensier's experiments in the novel through which her collective generated real and utopic visions of a society that valorized exilic sociability. Chapter 3 examines Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de Lafayette's Zayde (1670) in the context of Louis XIV's politics of border management and the ways in which the space of exile allows the individual to understand his or her role as both political and private subject. Chapter 4 considers the fairy tales of the 1690s as they participate in a culture where the excesses of individuals are contained by exile, an exile which paradoxically encourages the very kinds of movements society fears the most: those of social mobility. The history of exilic literature in seventeenth-century France, therefore, challenges the traditional aesthetization and metaphorization of exile by insisting on its effects as a physical and geographic reality.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory) -- University of Pennsylvania, 1999.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-07, Section: A, page: 2513.

Supervisor: Jean Dejean.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9780599389670

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.