ABSTRACT
This essay uses Stendhal’s description of court culture as ‘a collection of enemies and rivals’ to examine five key genres of courtier literature: the pastoral, the romance, the conduct manual, the sonnet and the epigram. A working model of court literature and the courtierly self is derived from Philip Bobbitt’s description of the early modern state. Under this model, court literature is seen to work with the dynamic of outsidership/insidership that dominates a patronage society. Conduct literature presents the central dilemma of the courtier in crafting a self-performance that seems not to be one. Chivalric epic displaces the rivalries of courtier society outward onto an imaginary exterior landscape of epic deeds. Pastoral attempts to escape into a rural repose. Love sonnetry attempts unceasingly to strike a sophisticated calculus between inner emotional suffering and outward self-advertisement. The epigram condenses sharp and discrete perceptions of courtier life into a small, accomplished format. At the conclusion, a new form of fiction is seen to emerge from a synthesis of these court-literature predecessors.
