A01=Marie-Madeleine Lafayette
adventure
aristocracy
Author_Marie-Madeleine Lafayette
battles
borders
catalonia
Category=DSB
christianity
class
cyprus
desire
destiny
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fate
french
iberian peninsula
islam
jealousy
literature
love
lovers
lust
madame de lafayette
medieval
military
nobility
novel
passion
prophecy
religion
romance
sensation
sexuality
shipwrecks
spirituality
suspense
translation
war
Product details
- ISBN 9780226468525
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2006
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, "Zayde" is both the swan song of a literary tradition nearly two thousand years old and a harbinger of the modern psychological novel. "Zayde" unfolds during the long medieval struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula; Madame de Lafayette (1634-93) takes the reader on a Mediterranean tour typical of classical and seventeenth-century romances - from Catalonia to Cyprus and back again - with battles, prophecies, and shipwrecks dotting the crisscrossed paths of the book's noble lovers. But where romance was long and episodic, "Zayde" possesses a magisterial architecture of suspense. Chaste and faithful heroines and heroes are replaced here by characters who are consumed by jealousy and unable to love happily. And, unlike traditional romance, the reader is no longer simply expected to admire deeds of bravery and virtue, but instead is caught up in intense first-person testimony on the psychology of desire.
Unavailable in English for more than two centuries, "Zayde" reemerges here in Nicholas Paige's accessible and vibrant translation as a worthy representative of a once popular genre and will be welcomed by readers of French literature and students of the European novelistic tradition.
Nicholas D. Paige is associate professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley.
