Renaissance excursions: Textual digressions and ideological transgressions in narrative prose of sixteenth -century France

In this dissertation, I analyze the relationship between narrative structure and ideology in four early modern texts. I undertake a study of what I have termed the "textual itinerary"---the text's voyage from an origin (arche) and towards an ostensible end ( telos). This approach reveals the ways in which the prose of the French Renaissance is markedly non-rectilinear and non-teleological. Rather than moving from a beginning to an end in an undeviating direction, sixteenth-century writers intentionally stray from the narrative course (cursus) by engaging in frequent textual digressions (excursus). A trope of diversion and abundance ever since Antiquity, the excursus had developed into a central expressive mode in vernacular literature of sixteenth-century France. The excursus in early modern French prose offered a place of solace and a locus of existence for marginal discourses and representations of alterity and difference.;My study focuses primarily on the kinds of excursuses that early modern writers of prose utilized to explore and analyze the boundaries that heretofore defined---and confined---many facets of both the human experience and the literary works that represent it. While early modern writers were exceedingly aware of the power of literature to establish frontiers and delimit spaces, they simultaneously demonstrated ways in which these limits could be transgressed. Writers of early modern French prose examine aspects of their society that call into question the possibility of a dominant ideology in either contemporary France or its letters. Digressive writing and the exploration and blurring of boundaries that it enacts thus generate a counter-ideology at the source of a literary reformation of narrative prose.;In Francois Rabelais's Pantagruel (1532), frequent digressions break the teleological advance, invert hierarchies, and deny the imperialist ideology of epic, the literary form that the work calls into question. The discussions in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron (1558) replace the novellas as the dominant narrative form and explore a variety of divergent opinions, diegetic trajectories, and deviations from social norms. In Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil (1578), Jean de Lery's narrative excursions blur the distinction between civilized and savage, French and foreign, and Christian and pagan. Michel de Montaigne's physical detours in Journal de voyage en Italie (1580--81) invite his textual digressions that explore many forms of cultural difference---and resemblance---and break down boundaries of religious doctrine, political affiliation, national and linguistic identity, and custom.