Centering his analysis on the consequences for self-representation of the epistemic shift to modernity, Dr. Hembree reassesses the cultural importance of one of the early seventeenth-century's neglected masterpieces of prose fiction, Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée . He argues that the narrative, published in five volumes from 1607 to 1627, provides an intellectual bridge between the rejection of ontological guarantees of identity and meaning in Montaigne's Essais , and the formulation of subjective consciousness as a new foundation for self-knowledge in the writings of Descartes. Suspended between medieval and modern paradigms of self-representation, L'Astrée contributed to the reconceptualization of the self and the social symbolic order that occurred in the early modern period. Therein lies its relevance for twentieth-century readers who, like d'Urfé's contemporaries, are caught in a semiotic crisis engendered by yet another cultural divide.
