“This book skillfully raises tensions between the nature of absolutism and foreign influence.”
—Susan Mokhberi, Rutgers University at Camden, H-France Review, vol 19 no. 168, August '19
“This rich and timely work combines close analysis of texts, images, and objects with historical contextualization and broad methodological reflections.”
—Olivia Tolley, Jesus College, Cambridge
“Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal is a major contribution to our understanding of the work of Bernier, his place in the early modern history of travel, and his contribution to the genre of the travel narrative. Beasley paves the way for further study of how the accounts of Bernier and other travellers influenced French imaginative literature, especially the novel.”
—Elizabeth Goldsmith, Department of Romance Studies, Boston University
“I firmly believe that Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal will represent one of the most interesting contributions to French studies in the decade. Beasley’s image of India fosters a better understanding of diversity in France in its rich traditions - literary, cultural, gender-related, and political - because this image was mediated through the social milieu of the women’s salon in seventeenth-century France, notably the gathering of Madame de la Sablière.”
—Jean-Vincent Blanchard, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Swarthmore College
“The ease and pleasure with which Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal reads belies the hard-hitting contributions it makes to French literary and cultural studies. When Beasley sets out to understand the engagement of two of the seventeenth-century’s most eminent women writers with India - what India might have meant to Sèvignè and Lafayette, and more broadly to France in these pivotal years of cultural consolidation – she creates a new and experimental methodology that imaginatively reconstructs the “conversation” out of which Bernier’s writings about Mughal India, and the salon-produced literature of Lafayette, Sèvignè, La Fontaine, and Fontenelle, emerged.”
—Claire Goldstein, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Davis