Nicholas Paige
Associate Professor

Professor Paige teaches courses ranging from Classical comedy and early modern conceptions of selfhood to detective fiction and films of the New Wave. He is currently completing Before Fiction, a study of the strategies used by early French novelists to think through the fluid relation between books and the world; Lafayette, Crébillon, Rousseau, and Balzac are among the authors analyzed.

Publications include:

“Permanent Re-Enchantments: On Some Literary Uses of the Supernatural from Early Empiricism to Modern Aesthetics” (in The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford 2009);

“Proto-Aesthetics and the Theatrical Image” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 69 (2008);

“Rousseau’s Readers Revisited: The Aesthetics of La Nouvelle Héloise” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.1 (2008);

“Relearning to Read: Truth and Reference in Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie” (in The Art of Instruction: Essays on Pedagogy and Literature in Seventeenth-Century France, Rodopi, 2008);

Lafayette’s Zayde: A Spanish Romance (trans., University of Chicago Press, 2006);

“The Storyteller and the Book: Scenes of Narrative Production in the Early French Novel” MLQ 67:2, 2006;

“Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the Postmodern Image)” Representations 88, 2004;

Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth-Century France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)