Reading Undercover: Audience and Authority in Jean de La Fontaine

Reading Undercover: Audience and Authority in Jean de La Fontaine
ISBN-10
0838753884
ISBN-13
9780838753880
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
160
Language
English
Published
1999
Publisher
Bucknell University Press
Author
Anne Lynn Birberick

Description

This study examines author/audience relations in the works of the seventeenth-century French poet Jean de La Fontaine. Focusing on the Fables, Les Amours de Psyche et de Cupidon, and the Contes, Anne L. Birberick explores how La Fontaine remains a largely subversive artist, even while he seeks to establish himself within a conventional system of literary patronage. Birberick offers an "anatomy" of readers as she shows how La Fontaine simultaneously appeals to multiple readers whose tastes range from the literal to the ironic, from the orthodox to the heterodox. To negotiate successfully between and among such diverse audiences, the poet employs techniques of concealment and disclosure to foster an anticanonical public.

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