Department of Romance Languages and Literatures of Harvard University

These five monographs, with an introduction by W. M. Frohock, utilize recent advances in image-study and thematics to explore previously uninvestigated aspects of the works of five important French novelists. Viewed together, the individual monographs present variations on a systematic approach to the close study of French fiction.

Emilie Bergmann discusses the poetic tradition of ekphrasis, the description of visual works of art, from Garcilaso de la Vega to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Dr. Bergmann demonstrates that ekphrasis exposes the boundaries between the arts and the limitations of artistic imitation, while using that limitation as a source for poetic wit.

In the plays of Corneille, paradox constitutes a major unifying force—both as an essential element in the complex moral and psychological makeup of Corneille’s heroes and heroines, and as the mainspring of his dramatic technique. This penetrating study, written in French, presents new insights into the work and genius of Corneille.

This is the first formalist study of the provocative French writer Jean Genet, treating both his major and more obscure texts. Camille Naish’s study insightfully discusses previous critical responses to Genet, examines Genet’s relationship with Cocteau and the Surrealists, and finally takes an original look at humor and parody in this unusual writer.

This generative phonological study brings together for the first time an exhaustive treatment of the Portuguese data relating to changes in vowel height and the several descriptive frameworks and distinctive feature systems available for their codification.

This is the first critical edition of Pierre de Larivey’s Les Esprits. In his introduction, Donald Stone discusses how Les Esprits itself is indebted to Lorenzino de Medici’s L’Aridosio and raises some interesting questions about the morality of French Renaissance comedy and the period’s conception of the genre.

The editors of this volume emphasize the play’s debt to Fernão Mendes Pinto whose prose epic (the Peregrinaçam) on the Portuguese presence in South, East, and Insular Asia inspired the Spanish work. Their introductory studies explain the play’s understandable yet false attribution to Lope de Vega and prove authorship by Antonio Enríquez Gómez.