Deceit, Desire, and the Novel - Self and Other in Literary Structure
| Author | René Girard; translated by Yvonne Freccero |
|---|---|
| Published | 1961 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — Girard’s first book: reading Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, he argues that desire is borrowed from a model — the origin of his theory of mimetic desire.
René Girard’s first book, published in French in 1961 as Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque and in this English translation by Yvonne Freccero (Johns Hopkins Press, 1965). The opening chapter, “‘Triangular’ Desire”, sets out the claim the rest of his work builds on: people rarely desire things spontaneously; they desire what a model or mediator desires, so desire runs along a triangle of subject, model and object.
The chapters work through the great European novelists — Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky — arguing that the “romantic” lie is the belief in autonomous desire, and the “novelistic” truth that the best novelists eventually expose it. Later chapters treat “Men Become Gods in the Eyes of Each Other”, master and slave, masochism and sadism, and the hero’s renunciation at the end of the great novels.
What it is: a classic of literary criticism and the founding text of mimetic theory. This copy is a scan of the in-print Johns Hopkins edition.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
331 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.