ABSTRACT
The attempt to shape one’s “gentle” reader via such models within the text as the main narrator and narratee appears relatively straightforward – even if it is carried out in such an indirect and discreet way as is the case in the Urania – because it relies on mechanisms of identification, assessment and valorisation, as well as appealing to readers’ emotions. Yet the reading of a text can also be influenced in what might be described as more mechanical ways through a work’s narrative structures and patterns. As outlined in the first chapter, the romance genre, for example, favours a double movement: forward on the one hand, as adventure follows adventure, and backward or inward, on the other, since embedded narratives reveal more and more about the past or the relations between individual characters and events. In other words, romance typically progresses by means of digression, and major concerns of the text are enriched because reflected or supplemented in interpolated stories. These structural particularities necessarily shape the reading practices of readers who are willing to engage with such a text, prompting them to pay attention both to the work’s episodic variety and its thematic reflection on overarching issues.
