APPROACHES TO TEACHING LAFAYETTE'S "THE PRINCESS OF CLEVES"

Frequently identified in French literary histories as the first modern novel―that is, the first to focus on its characters’ thoughts and feelings instead of their heroic actions―Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves has provoked discussion and strong opinions since it was published in 1678. Today instructors use this increasingly popular novel not only in French literature courses but also in comparative literature courses, women’s studies courses, and theme-oriented courses; but its unfamiliar historical setting can be daunting to contemporary classes. In the words of the editors, this collection aims to “give colleagues . . . a sense of seventeenth-century France and show how the novel is a product of this milieu, for these are the keys to making the novel comprehensible and indeed enjoyable to students.”

Faith E. Beasley is associate professor of French at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Revising Memory: Women's Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (1990) and of articles on seventeenth-century French women writers, the salons, and the development of literary taste during the seventeenth century. She is writing a book on the role of the seventeenth century in the creation of France's national identity. Katharine Ann Jensen is associate professor of French and of women's and gender studies at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605-1776 (1995) and of various articles on women writers in ancient régime France. She is working on a book on famous women's accounts of mother-daughter relations in French literature from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century.