"La Duchesse d'Estramene" du Sieur Du Plaisir

Abstract

The author has undertaken a critical edition of a late seventeenth-century French novel whose contemporary popularity ended in virtual obscurity for two and a half centuries. It has recently received some attention in the context of the development of French literature and the novel genre. This for the most part has been in relation to the theoretical work published by the same author, Le Sieur Du Plaisir, a year following the appearance of the novel La Duchesse d 'Estramene. A facsimile printing of the novel with an Introduction by Rene Goderme, was published by Slatkine Reprints in 1978. An edition by Giorgetto Giorgi appeared, in Italian, in 1978. To our knowledge, the present thesis represents the only allocated edition of the novel in French. The Introduction provides contextual material regarding the political philosophical, socio-moral and literary context in which the novel was written and the period that it covers -- the recent past, in the courtly society of Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France. Certain stylistic characteristics are enlarged upon in the annotations to the text of the novel which seems to stand on the cusp between the heroic. baroque form of the genre, as seen in La PriJ1cesse de Cleves (1678), by Madame de Lafayette, and the more classic style and naturalistic approach that were to follow.