The iconography of power

Despite its enormous success and its evident importance in the context of sixteenth-century French literature, few major studies have been written about the French nouvelle of the age of Rabelais, aside from the explosion of articles and books on the Heptameron during the last decade. This study defends the thesis that various nouvelle collections employ an iconographic mode of representation, developing characters by means of external details that situate them on grids of hierarchical power relations.

Author David LaGuardia concentrates on the philosophical implications of the nouvelle as a means of cataloging a large body of information about everyday life across a wide social spectrum in France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.