Abstract
Abstract Often associated with similar fictions of the animal narrator or speaker by Lucian or Plutarch, Apuleius’s Golden Ass remained a vivid model for 17th-century novelists such as Francesco Pona (La Lucerna, 1625) and Francesco Fulvio Frugoni (Il Cane di Diogene, 1688), or the French anonymous author of l’Asne ruant (1620), Antoine Torche (Le Chien de Boulogne, 1668) and Jacques Alluis (Le Chat d’Espagne, 1669). While Italian authors would favour a Baroque poetics of satire, underlining the bestiality of human behaviours in a sombre tone, French authors tended to give a more positive value to the animal, contrasting its innocent point of view with the depravity of mundane life. Yet, all pay a debt to Apuleius’s art, as metamorphosis (or the alternate device of metempsychosis) serves as a metaphor blurring the line between animality and humanity. The bestiality of sexual desire is more especially at stake, as these narratives form an original trend in the landscape of 17th-century novelistic treatment of love. And contrary to what happens in the Golden Ass, they do not necessarily end by reasserting the limits between (wo)man and beast, echoing the vast trouble raised by the early modern controversy on the animal soul.
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