The Early Novel in French : Poetics of a Genre in the Making

Examining the role of changes in print technologies and poetics in the early novel

Around the same time that Aristotle's Poetics was reemerging from obscurity, Rabelais was composing his Pantagruel series, while a host of influential works in a chivalric, sentimental, or pastoral vein were being imported from Spain and Italy. From this emergent corpus, Rabelais's is the only name to have unambiguously made it into our modern canon of literary history, where he appears to stand alone as an early pioneer of the novel. The Early Novel in French: Poetics of a Genre in the Making explores the literary, cultural, and eminently material soil in which these early forms of what we would come to know as the novel originally took root, showing how they were imaginatively responding to the practices and uncertainties of the literary texts of their own era as well as to works of classical antiquity.

Within the flowering of experimental fictional forms in mid-sixteenth-century France, Virginia Krause identifies historical subplots shaping the development of this genre. As rhetorical culture continued to animate fictions through an active literary tradition, print culture was changing the very fabric of books. The early novel was thus at once rhetorically fashioned and technologically manufactured. Meanwhile, the legacy of medieval romance adventure persisted, making the early novel in French both a new laboratory for Aristotelian immersion and a vehicle for a mysterious and fugitive romanesque. Krause sheds fresh light on this new and rapidly evolving genre: its lifelike personas or "person-fictions"; its material forms, from pocket-sized volumes to vast literary serials; its immersive powers; and its underappreciated role in the production of the modern author.