FR 4516/5516 will examine French Novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Authors studied will include Mme de Lafayette, l'Abbé Prévost, Voltaire, Mme de Graffigny, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Class discussions and lectures will involve a combination of detailed analysis of the authors' works and synthetic contextualization, tying the texts into significant cultural, artistic, philosophical and historical trends and events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Grades will be based on participation in class discussions, two short papers, and a final term paper. The course is conducted entirely in French.