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The first book-length study to trace the origins of the essay to the conte, Montaigne and Brief Narrative Form puts the reader in touch with how unstable times and exceptional artistic insights transform one genre to create a new artistic form.

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Introduction. The Essay. That Heretical Genre 1. Renewing the Ancients. Montaigne´s Retelling of the Tales of Antiquity 2. Recounting Others, Recounting Self. Montaigne and the Conteurs of his Century 3. Rewriting Culture. Montaigne Recounts New World Ethnography 4. ´Se peindre de la plume´: History, Biography, and Self-Portraiture in Montaigne´s Reframing of History 5. A Storied Life and A Lived Story: Writing Oneself in Montaigne´s Essais 6. "Mes ancestres avoient la medecine à contrecoeur ´´My Ancestors had an Aversion to Medicine´: Medical Discourse, Observation, and Self-Portraiture Conclusion ´Ce fagotage de tant de diverses pieces´/´This Bundle of So Many Disparate Pieces Notes Bibliography Index

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Currently Professor Emerita of French at Arizona State University, USA, Deborah Losse served as Chair of the then Department of Languages and Literatures, now the School of International Letters and Cultures, President of the Academic Senate, Associate Dean of the Graduate College, and Dean of Humanities before her retirement in 2010. She is the author of numerous articles on Renaissance French Literature in Modern Language Notes, Romanic Review, Neophilologus, Medievalia et Humanistica, Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, Montaigne Studies Allegorica, Symposium, and Poetics Today. Her previous books include Rhetoric at Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy; Sampling the Book: Renaissance Prologues and the French Conteurs. She has contributed chapters to the following volumes: Approaches to Teaching the Heptaméron, ed. Colette H. Winn; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Fran‡ois Rabelais, ed. Todd W. Reeser and Floyd Gray; Renaissance Women Writers: French Texts/American Contexts, eds. Anne R. Larsen and Colette H. Winn; Narrative Worlds: Essays in the Early Nouvelle in 15th and 16th Century France, David LaGuardia and Gary Ferguson, and in La Satire dans tous ses états, ed. Bernd Renner.

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