SOURCE: “The Politics of Genre: Madeleine de Scudéry and the Rise of the French Novel,” in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 29, No. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 43-51.

In the following essay, DeJean argues that Artamène was a response to contemporary political events. As such, she suggests, Scudéry's work helps demonstrate how the novel as a genre was a response to the French political climate of the seventeenth century.

Historians and literary historians have for some time asserted that the earliest types of prose fiction developed in 17th-century France played a central role “in the development and diffusion of feminist ideas.”¹ Without exception, the strains of prose fiction in which today's readers would recognize the emerging modern novel were the creation of women writers, a literary fact the theoretician Huet underscored as early as 1670 in a lengthy preface to Lafayette's Zayde. It is only by attempting to view the...