Rococo Fiction in France, 16001715 Seditious Frivolity [Hardcover]

This thought- provoking study aims to rehabilitate a branch of French prose writing that has been traditionally overlooked or treated with disdain. . . .By showing that the rococo coexisted with classicisme, maintaining a dialectical relationship to the cultural mainstream rather than simply coming to prominence in the following century, she sheds new light on the process whereby new ways of thinking gradually emerged and won acceptance.Much of the imaginative literature published in seventeenth-century France eludes easy categorization into standard generic rubrics. Compilations of novellas, often interspersed with poetry, dialogues, treatises, letters, fairy tales, and other kinds of texts too numerous to list, made up a significant portion of the periods creative literary output. Allison Stedmans ambitious, thought-provoking book shines a light on these generically hybrid literary creations and demonstrates their aesthetic value and social productivity.Author Allison Stedman makes a case for the rococo as a seventeenth-century literary phenomenon that provided an ideological counterpoint to the rise of French political absolutism. Stedman traces the rococos evolution and the study unearths the rococos counter-vision for the origins of the French Enlightenment.Rococo Fiction in France reconfigures the history of the long eighteenth century by revealing the rococo as a literary phenomenon that characterized a range of experimental texts from the end of the French Renaissance to the eve of the French Revolution. Tracing the literary rococos evolution from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, and exploring its radicalization during the 1670s, '80s, and '90s, Allison Stedman unearths the seventeenth century rococos counter-vision for the trajectory of the French monarchy and the dawn of the French Enlightenment.The first part of the study investigates the relationship between Montaignes philosophy of literary production and those of early seventeenth-century l/