Mimesis and Theory

René Girard is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of French Civilization at Stanford University and a member of the Académie française. Robert Doran is James P. Wilmot Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester.

• @fmct:Contents @toc4:Editor's Noteiii Editor's Introductioniii @toc2:1History in Saint-John Perse000 2Val'ry and Stendhal000 3Classicism and Voltaire's Historiography000 4Stendhal and Tocqueville000 5Pride and Passion in the Contemporary Novel000 6Memoirs of a Dutiful Existentialist: Simone de Beauvoir000 7Marcel Proust000 8Marivaudage, Hypocrisy, and Bad Faith000 9Formalism and Structuralism in Literature and the Human Sciences000 10Racine, Poet of Glory000 11Monsters and Demi-Gods in Hugo000 12Bastards and the Anti-Hero in Sartre000 13Critical Reflections on Literary Studies000 14Narcissism: The Freudian Myth Demystified by Proust000 15Theory and Its Terrors000 16Love and Hate in Ch'tien de Troyes' Yvain000 17Innovation and Repetition000 18Mimetic Desire in the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky000 19Conversion in Literature and Christianity000 20The Passionate Oxymoron in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet000 @toc4:Sources000 Notes000 Index000

"[T]his collection spans the course of Girard's career and provides a concise way to gain some perspective on his legacy . . . One the whole, this volume confirms Girard's reputation as a first-rate literary critic, devoted to the close study of literary texts but avoiding the pitfalls of l'art pour l'art formalism by asking extra-literary, essentially anthropological, questions of them, and emphasizing the insights and lessons that literature has to offer us in those matters that are of greatest import to us."—Eric Prieto, SubStance