| The objective of my research is to examine the devices that late 17 th and 18th-century novelists employ to camouflage moral, philosophical or ideological discourse under the guise of examples. Although it is widely accepted that rhetoric reached new heights during that era, exemplarity has attracted little attention from 17th and 18th-century scholars. Drawing on evidence I have collected from theoretical texts, I shed light on the rhetorical and didactic qualities for which examples were praised. Through a sustained analysis of a range of prose works, I analyze the hidden mechanisms through which novelists are able to satisfy their readers' thirst for entertainment while simultaneously edifying them---mechanisms that are particularly evident in Madame de Villedieu's Les Desordres de l'amour, Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, and Rousseau's Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise. I also demonstrate that the libertine novelist Crebillon exploits the example in his Lettres de la Marquise so as to subvert its moral virtues and to distance himself from his predecessors' ethics. |
