Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century Inventing Renaissance France / Timothy Hampton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hampton, Timothy.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nationalism in literature.

French literature.

French literature--16th century--History and criticism.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2021

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2001.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"Contemporary scholarship on nation-building in early modern Europe has emphasized the importance of centralized power and the rise of absolute monarchy. Hampton offers a counterargument, demonstrating that both community and national identity in Renaissance France were defined through a dialogic relationship to that which was not French - to the foreigner, the stranger, the intruder from abroad. He provides both a methodological challenge to traditional cultural history and a new consideration of the role of literature in the definition of the nation."--Jacket.

Hampton's analysis of works by Rabelais, Montaigne, Du Bellay, and Marguerite de Navarre, as well as writings by lesser-known poets, pamphleteers, and political philosophers, shows that the vulnerability of France and the instability of French identity were pervasive cultural themes during this period."

"The foundational texts of modern French literature were produced during a period of unprecedented struggle over the meaning of community. In the face of religious heresy, political threats from abroad, and new forms of cultural diversity, Renaissance French culture confronted, in new and urgent ways, the question of what it means to be "French." Hampton shows how conflicts between different concepts of community were mediated symbolically through the genesis of new literary forms.

"Assessing the relationship between the emergence of modern French literary culture and the ideological debates that marked Renaissance France, Timothy Hampton explores the role of literary form in shaping national identity."

Contents:

Garden of letters : toward a theory of literary nationhood

The limits of ideology : Rabelais and the edge of Christendom

Nation and utopia in the 1530s : the case of Rabelais's Gargantua

Narrative form and national space : textual geography from the Heptameron to La princesse de Cleves

Representing France at mid-century : Du Bellay and the lyric invention of national character

History, alterity, and the European subject in Montaigne's Essais

Pauline's dream.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781501721687

1501721682

OCLC:

1083598301