English Language and Literature ETDs
Publication Date
8-17-1964
Abstract
Nearly all critics of the novel from Saintsbury to Fiedler take note of the influence of Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cléves on later fiction, even though they do not always consider this influence significant. In his Essays on French Novelists, Saintsbury comments that with this novel madam de Lafayette cut the romance “from the dimensions of an encyclopedia to a pamphlet” and “infused into its atmosphere a very considerable proportion of the breath of actual life and universal human nature.” Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957), feels that for all its psychological penetration La Princesse de Cléves stands outside the main tradition of the novel because it is too stylish to be authentic. Although Leslie Fiedler mentions the Princesse de Cléves in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), he feels that she is a type of passionate heroine lacking in American fiction.
Degree Name
English
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
English
First Committee Member (Chair)
George Warren Arms
Second Committee Member
Donald Johnson Greene
Third Committee Member
Ernest Truett Book
Fourth Committee Member
Paul Benjamin Davis
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Recommended Citation
Greene, Mildred Sarah. "Love and Duty: The Character of the Princesse de Clèves as Reflected in Certain Later English and American Novels (Studies in Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Henry Jame's The Wings of the Dove and The Portrait of a Lady)." (1964). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/445