Cosmopolitan fictions: Foreign relations and the novel in 17th-century France

Until recently, critics of the 17th century French novel have dismissed the variety of foreign settings depicted in this body of literature as “decorative,” shallow, or insufficiently “exotic”. Recognizing that these novels were written during an age of expansionism, this dissertation proposes to take novels seriously as a medium for imagining global relations in 17th-century France. Focusing on novels that depict cross-cultural relationships, I examine the vocabularies of affection and belonging, theories of difference, ways of describing community identity and political and cultural subjectivity proposed by fiction, considering how they may have shaped readers\u27 imaginative bonds to the world beyond French borders. The introduction reads through a number of 17th-century critical discourses on the novel, examining how the idea of foreignness figures crucially into articulations of verisimilitude and literary pleasure. Chapter 1 examines translation as an expression of the tension between naturalizing and exoticizing tendencies in fiction writing through a study of a chain of literary imitations inspired by the Ethiopica. Chapters 2 and 3 consider novels that employ figures of conquest to describe the expansion of domestic communities. Chapter 2 looks at the figure of the “gentle conquerer” in heroic romances by Gomberville and Scudéry in relation with contemporary discourses of French colonialism. Chapter 3 revisits the myth of the “gentle French conqueror” in its discussion of Préchac\u27s L\u27Illustre Parisienne, a Paris-obsessed “gallant” novel, and its role in promoting an idea of Frenchness that “conquered” foreign courts. The final chapters focus on novels that challenge understandings of the political community as a homogeneous entity. Chapter 4 analyzes Lafayette\u27s Zayde, showing how the novel, by exploring its alien heroine\u27s processes of integration and domestication, develops narrative strategies to describe cultural and political subjectivity. Chapter 5 turns to two examples of late 17th-century memoir fictions. Courtilz\u27s Mémoires de Rochefort and d\u27Aulnoy\u27s Mémoires de la cour d\u27Espagne , to examine the perspective of the ambassador or spy as an optic for interrogating political subjectivity in an international context. The dissertation proposes new readings of prominent 17th-century French novels that foreground questions of foreignness, global relations, and political and cultural community