Compassion's Edge: War and Marriage in Seventeenth-Century French Fiction

Date: Monday 5 August 2013
Time: 1:00pm - 2.00pm
Venue: Stretton Room, Level 4, Napier Building, The University of Adelaide

Keynote Speaker:  Dr Katherine Ibbett, University College, London

Enquiries: Janet Hart, Tel: 08 8313 2421

All welcome.

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When the French novel gets going as a genre in the late
17th Century, it repeatedly represents the crisis of the
religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in
the late 16thc. Equally repeatedly, the novel is drawn
to scenes of compassionate misunderstanding between
men and women in aristocratic marriage. In this
paper I’ll consider the ways in which the early French novel
explored these questions of compassion and toleration,
and the limits of both.