In her upcoming talk, Virginia Krause proposes to fill in a missing chapter in our History of the Novel, which has long overlooked sixteenth-century France in its rush to identify the birth of the modern novel (for modernists) or the demise of medieval romance (for medievalists). In the experimental fictions of mid-sixteenth-century France, ancient rhetorical culture and new print technologies converged, Krause argues, shedding new light on a rapidly evolving genre—its lifelike personas or “person-fictions”; its immersive powers over readers; and, amidst all its experimental properties and “new” technologies, the enduring place occupied by ancient rhetorical culture and medieval adventure, core principles for this genre-in-the-making.

Biography:

Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University, Virginia Krause is the author of Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 2015) and Idle Pursuits (Delaware, 2003). Her talk will be drawn from her new book, The Early Novel in French: Poetics of a Genre in the Making (Northwestern, forthcoming).