This book offers, in each case, intimate critical readings which spin out into broad interrogations about knowledge and experience in early modern French literature. It considers the ineffability of some kinds of experience alongside everyday human communication and encounters.

French philosophical and scientific writers of the early modern period made various use of forms of narrative language that aims to tell a story in their texts. Equally, authors of fiction often sought to appropriate the language and tools of philosophical and scientific investigation. The contributions in this collection, from some of the most distinguished and exciting scholars working in French Studies today, aim to bring into question oppositional relationships between terms such as 'philosophy' and 'fiction' when these are applied to early modern texts. They consider authors as diverse as Montaigne, Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Villedieu and Mme de Lafayette. If we are to be true to the early modern period, they argue, we have to acknowledge it as a time when the figurative, anecdotal and fictive on the one hand, and the truth-seeking on the other, influence each other mutually. Emma Gilby is University Lecturer in French, University of Cambridge. Paul White is Research Associate in French, University of Cambridge.

Descartes's Fictions traces common movements in early modern philosophy and literary method. Emma Gilby reassesses the significance of Descartes's writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. She argues that humanist theorizing about poetics represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes's work. She offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise, with particular reference to the genre of tragicomedy, questions of verisimilitude or plausibility, and the figures of Guez de Balzac and Pierre Corneille. Drawing on what Descartes says about, and to, his many contemporaries and correspondents embedded in the early modern republic of letters, this volume shows that poetics provides a repository of themes and images to which he returns repeatedly: fortune, method, error, providence, passion, and imagination, for instance. Like the poets and theorists of his age, Descartes is also drawn to the forms of attention that people may bring to his work. This interest finds expression in the mature Cartesian metaphysics of the Meditations, as well as, later, in the moral philosophy of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia or the Passions of the Soul. This volume thus bridges the gap between Cartesian criticism and late-humanist literary culture in France.

What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Thinking about literature and the visual arts is found in many places - in treatises, apologies, and paragoni; in prefaces, letters, and essays; in commentaries, editions, reading notes, and commonplace books; in images, sculptures, and built spaces; within or on the thresholds of works of poetry and visual art. It is situated between different disciplines and methods. Critical ideas and methods come into England from other countries, and take root in particular locations - the court, the Inns of Court, the theatre, the great house, the printer's shop, the university. The practice of criticism is transplanted to the Americas and attempts to articulate the place of poetry in a new world. And commonplaces of classical poetics and rhetoric serve both to connect and to measure the space between different critical discourses. Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts requires consideration of various kinds of place - material, textual, geographical - and the practices particular to those places; it also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. This book brings together scholars working in departments of English, modern languages, and art history to look at the many different places of early modern criticism. It argues polemically for the necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.