The European Roman d’Analyse

Unconsummated Love Stories from Boccaccio to Stendhal

Adele Kudish

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501373756
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501352232
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• 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 Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves
• 4 Self as the “Grand Misleader” in Richardson’s 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
• Imprint