Clio, Eros, Thanatos
Subtitle: the "novela sentimental" in context
By: Theresa Ann Sears.
Series: Currents in comparative Romance languages and literatures ;; vol. 98
Publisher: P. Lang
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 283
Subjects: Romance literature -- History and criticism.; Love in literature.; Courtly love in literature.; Sentimentalism in literature.
Description: "Clio, Eros, Thanatos argues that the sentimental mode plays itself out along a scale from the chivalric to the pornographic, thereby encompassing amatory narratives both chaste and erotic. The texts studied - Le Chevalier de la Charette, Carcel de amor, Celestina, and La Princesse de Cleves - implicate both private and public realms in an irresistible drive toward an impossible unity, the result of which is usually a form of death.

Here, desire is never dealt with on a simple, bodily level, but rather is analyzed according to some ethical, moral, rational, or political criteria, which turns love into an aesthetic - rather than a mimetic - phenomenon.

Already in the fifteenth century, the Spanish novela sentimental presents the evidence for the erotic paradox, which dominates the sentimental mode that argues that desire/love is ethically and aesthetically ennobling, and at the same time, morally subversive and destructive."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [267]-279) and index.