Freedom and the Novel in

This book is an important contribution to the vigorous and growing revival of interest in the seventeenth-century French novel as the progenitor of what has become the dominant literary genre in our o w n time. In a brilliant discussion of a group of compelling works of prose fiction by freethinking authors whose flamboyant life styles, radical ideas, and auda cious attacks on the established order made their literary productions suspect, Joan D e Jean demonstrates that the issues at the heart of the libertine enterprise—autobiography, madness, fragmentation, and dialogue—are precisely those that define the problematic modernity of these works. In detailed analyses of Theophile de Viau's Fragments d'une his toire comique, Charles SorePs Francion, Tris tan L'Hermite's Lepage disgracie, Cyrano d