Montaigne's Unruly Brood

Perhaps as old as writing itself, the metaphor of the book as child has depicted textuality as an only son conceived to represent its father uniformly and to assure the integrity of his name. Richard L. Regosin demonstrates how MontaignesEssaisboth departs from and challenges this conventional figure of textuality. He argues that Montaignes writing is best described as a corpus of siblings with multiple faces and competing voices, a hybrid textuality inclined both to truth and dissimulation, to faithfulness and betrayal, to form and deformation. And he analyzes how this unruly, mixed brood also discloses a sexuality and gender dynamic in theEssaisthat is more conflicted than the traditional metaphor of literary paternity allows. Regosin challenges traditional critics by showing how the logic of a faithful filial text is disrupted and how the writing self displaces the authors desire for mastery and totalization. He approaches theEssaisfrom diverse critical and theoretical perspectives that provide new ground for understanding both Montaignes complex textuality and the obtrusive reading that it simultaneously invites and resists. His analysis is informed by poststructuralist criticism, by reception theory, and by gender and feminist studies, yet at the same time he treats theEssaisas a child of sixteenth-century Humanism and late Renaissance France. Regosin also examines Montaignes self-proclaimed taste for Ovid and the role played by the seminal texts of self-representation and aesthetic conception (Narcissus and Pygmalion) and the myth of sexual metamorphosis (Iphis). This title is part of UC Presss Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.