SOURCE: “Recognizing Differences: Perrault's Modernist Esthetic in Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes,” in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Vol. 10, No. 18, 1983, pp. 135-48.

In the following essay, Berg contends that the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns was “not only a literary debate, but also the manifestation of a political position regarding the status of women and their right to participate in the culture of their society.”

Perrault's Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes represents the principal articulation of his literary theory and his essential contribution to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. The Querelle is the culmination of an argument that continues throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the relative merits of the literature of classical antiquity and that of contemporary France. In its final stage, the debate pits Boileau, Racine, La Fontaine, aristocrats such as Condé and the Prince de...