Publisher:
University of Chicago Press, Chicago
;
EBSCO Industries, Inc., Birmingham, AL, USA
Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, Zayde is both the swan song of a literary tradition nearly two thousand years old and a harbinger of the modern psychological novel. Zayde unfolds during the...
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Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, Zayde is both the swan song of a literary tradition nearly two thousand years old and a harbinger of the modern psychological novel. Zayde unfolds during the long medieval struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula; Madame de Lafayette (1634-93) takes the reader on a Mediterranean tour typical of classical and seventeenth-century romances?from Catalonia to Cyprus and back again?with battles, prophecies, and shipwrecks dotting the crisscrossed paths of the book?s noble l.