A poetics of paradox: Images of discourse in early modern novelistic fiction

This dissertation examines the development of early modern novelistic prose fiction through the writings of three authors from different national traditions working within a twentyfive year period around the turn of the seventeenth century: Miguel de Cervantes, Thomas Deloney and Charles Sorel. Using Bakhtin's conceptualization of the processes and techniques of novelization as a theoretical framework, I identify the objectification of images of discourse as the centerpiece of the novelistic poetics of these three authors. Cervantes' Don Quijote, Deloney's The Gentle Craft and Sorel's Histoire comique de Francion are each conceived along the dual axes of inscription and representation. On one hand, they demonstrate an investment in inscribing other forms of discourse into their own literary texts; on the other, they work to represent discourse in its individuated singularity as the product of a specific voice. In both instances, the result is the construction of distinct kinds and instances of images of discourse which constitute the novels themselves. Situating its readings within a context whose instabilities (and consciousness of those instabilities) are returning to the foreground of critical scholarship, and against historicist readings of early modern fiction which fix texts as documents or archival repositories of contextual ideological forces, A Poetics of Paradox, examines these authors' fictive exploration of discursive form and of the very possibility of narrative to serve as a stable medium for such forces. Each of the three works studied presents discourse as both emblematic and anamorphic, perpetually working to achieve fixed meaning yet consistently revealed as duplicitous, multiple and paradoxical. Discourse in Cervantes, Deloney and Sorel is always intertextual and dialogic, and thus it always leads to more discourse: whereas Deloney's text moves diachronically from recognizable generic patterns to the confused (and confusing) polyphony of early modern cosmopolitan life, Cervantes collapses and recombines the two poles of Deloney's narrative through the figure of Don Quijote himself, thus concretizing the intertextual nature of the individual voice and emphasizing its unhappy coexistence with other, equally unstable voices, while Sorel depicts, through the same structure of intertextuality, the self's own non-self-coincidence.