Download or read book Memoirs of the Life of Henriette Sylvie de Moliere written by Madame de Villedieu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as Madame de Villedieu, Marie-Catherine Desjardins (ca. 1640-83) was a prolific writer who played an important role in the evolution of the early modern French novel. One of the earliest women to write for a living, she defied cultural convention by becoming an innovator and appealing to popular tastes through fiction, drama, and poetry. Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, a semi autobiographical novel, portrays an enterprising woman who writes the story of her life, a complex tale that runs counter to social expectations and novelistic conventions. A striking work, the story skillfully mixes real events from the author's life with fictional adventures. At a time when few women published, Villedieu's Memoirs is a significant achievement in creating a voice for the early modern woman writer. Produced while the French novel form was still in its infancy, it should be welcomed by any scholar of women's writing or the early development of the novel.
Download or read book Body Gender Senses written by Carin Franzén and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-03-04 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The body, touch and its sensations are present, sometimes viewed in contradictory ways, both expressed, visualized, and rejected, in early modern art and literature. In seven essays moving from the 16th to the mid-18th century, and from Italy and Spain to France and Sweden, this volume explores strategies used by early modern women poets, philosophers, and artists in order to create subversive expressions of the body, gender and the senses. Showing how body and soul, the carnal and the divine, the senses and the mind, could be represented as intertwined and dependent on each other in various ways, it gives due attention to European women writers and artists that in unconventional ways responded to the period's two main intellectual and philosophical attitudes - Epicurean and Stoic - towards the body and its senses. These attitudes not only intersect in the period's discussions of virtue and other moral phenomena, but are central to critical assessment of the relations between emotions, perception, and reason. By following this topic from a gender perspective, the book highlights other forms of subjectivity than the ones usually related to the early modern period's dominating subjectivation of female bodies, thinking and desires.
Download or read book The Wandering Life I Led written by Susan Shifrin and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book of essays brings together international scholars working on the literary, visual, musical, and theatrical representations and reception of Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin, an early modern woman whose literal—geographical—“border crossings” serve here as the starting point for an investigation of her and others’ elisions and transgressions of borders of all kinds. The authors lay out strategies for exploring the ways in which she crossed geographical, gendered, cultural, and—in scholarly terms—disciplinary boundaries, and in so doing, consider how an investigation of those border crossings can enhance our understanding of early modern cultural formation. The new work presented here by some of the most distinguished junior and senior scholars working today in the fields of history, art history, literary history, the history of theater, and the history of music promises to stimulate a broader scholarly discussion about early modern border-crossing and women’s places in the early modern period in general.
Download or read book The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France written by Domna C. Stanton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its six case studies, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France works out a model for (early modern) gender, which is articulated in the introduction. The book comprises essays on the construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. Since gender is a relational construct, each chapter considers as well specific textual and contextual representations of men. In every instance, Stanton looks for signs of conformity to-and deviations from-normative gender scripts. The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice. The Afterword examines some of the meanings of reading-as-a-feminist.
Download or read book Love Notes and Letters written by Madame de Villedieu and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first translation into English of two seminal works by the seventeenth-century French woman author, Marie-Catherine Desjardins, better known as Madame de Villedieu. The first of these works, Lettres et billets galants [Love Notes and Letters], was published in 1668 and contains her most intimate letters to her lover, Antoine de Villedieu. The second work, Le Portefeuille [The Letter Case], which appeared in 1674, is an epistolary novel composed of a series of ten letters from the Marquis de Naumanoir to a nobleman in the provprovinces. These letters recount in a delightfully playful manner the amorous misadventures and intrigues of a half-dozen Parisian socialites. This work's close ties in terms of content and form to the publication of Villedieu's Lettres et billets gallants six years earlier make it a perfect complement. The author's introduction offers not only a critical interpretation of these works but stresses the importance of the publication of Desjardins' authentic correspondence as a turning point in her career and key to her later works.
Download or read book Women Writers in Pre Revolutionary France written by Collette H. Winn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensive collection of English-language essays examines the many strategies of resistance to male domination that women in France from the 16th through the 18th centuries utilized in their lives and their writings.
Download or read book Imagining Women s Conventual Spaces in France 1600 1800 written by Barbara R. Woshinsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending history and architecture with literary analysis, this ground-breaking study explores the convent's place in the early modern imagination. The author brackets her account between two pivotal events: the Council of Trent imposing strict enclosure on cloistered nuns, and the French Revolution expelling them from their cloisters two centuries later. In the intervening time, women within convent walls were both captives and refugees from an outside world dominated by patriarchal power and discourses. Yet despite locks and bars, the cloister remained "porous" to privileged visitors. Others could catch a glimpse of veiled nuns through the elaborate grills separating cloistered space from the church, provoking imaginative accounts of convent life. Not surprisingly, the figure of the confined religious woman represents an intensified object of desire in male-authored narrative. The convent also spurred "feminutopian" discourses composed by women: convents become safe houses for those fleeing bad marriages or trying to construct an ideal, pastoral life, as a counter model to the male-dominated court or household. Recent criticism has identified certain privileged spaces that early modern women made their own: the ruelle, the salon, the hearth of fairy tale-telling. Woshinsky's book definitively adds the convent to this list.
Download or read book Publishing Women s Life Stories in France 1647 1720 written by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new study, Elizabeth Goldsmith continues her pursuit of issues treated in her earlier books on conversation, epistolary writing, and the female voice in literature. She examines how French women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries first came to publish their private life stories; in doing so, she explores what the writers have to say about why they decide to write about themselves, what they choose to write, how they get their stories circulated and printed, and what they do to defend themselves against the threat to personal reputation and credibility that was implied by such public self-exposure. Goldsmith scrutinizes the autobiographical writing of six women, all of whom were, for different reasons, the objects of fairly intense publicity during their lifetime, at the historical moment when the idea of "publicity" via the printed word was still a new concept. Three of the women-Jeanne des Anges, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Jeanne Guyon-were charismatic religious figures whose writings were widely circulated. The other three writers-the sisters Hortense and Marie Mancini, and Madame de Villedieu-are more worldly, but like their spiritual counterparts, they undertook self-publication as a form of conversation with the world, and a way of participating in other forms of public discourse. Publishing Women's Life Stories in France, 1647-1720 considers the different forms that the life writing of these three women took: autobiographies; letter correspondences (which in four of the six cases have never before been published); trial transcripts; testimonials published as part of other authors' works; and written self-portraits that were circulated among friends. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau on voice and communities of readers in the 17th century, as well as the work of Roger Chartier and other historians of the book and print culture, Goldsmith retraces the complicated networks of human interaction that underlie these early a
Download or read book Writings by Pre Revolutionary French Women written by Colette H. Winn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris written by Anna-Louise Milne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No city more than Paris has had such a constant and deep association with the development of literary forms and cultural ideas. The idea of the city as a space of literary self-consciousness started to take hold in the sixteenth century. By 1620, where this volume begins, the first in a long line of extraordinary works of the human imagination, in which the city represented itself to itself, had begun to find form in print. This collection follows that process through to the present day. Beginning with the 'salon', followed by the hybrid culture of libertinage and the revolutionary hotbeds of working-class districts, it explores the continuities and changes between the pre-modern era and the nineteenth century, when Paris asserted itself as cultural capital of Europe. It goes on to explore how this vision of Paris as a key capital of modernity has shaped contemporary literature.
Download or read book Homosexuality in French History and Culture written by Jeffrey Merrick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deconstruct changing representations of homosexuality with this important new work of cultural criticism! Homosexuality in French History and Culture explores episodes, patterns, and images of same-sex attraction in France from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from the essays of Michel de Montaigne to pride parades in contemporary Paris. This groundbreaking book documents the ways homosexuality has been named, experienced, regulated, understood, and imagined. During these centuries, homosexuality has been stigmatized as a sin, crime, or disease, and denounced as a threat to social order and national identity. Yet the rhetoric of condemnation has always co-existed with the reality of toleration. This groundbreaking collection analyzes the ways in which persecutions, as well as differences within minority sexual subcultures, have highlighted stereotypes and anxieties about class and age differences, gendered roles, and separatism. Homosexuality in French History and Culture offers historical and literary studies based on a wide variety of sources, including: novels, plays, and poetry gossip and satires police reports medical texts travel literature newspapers and periodicals memoirs Homosexuality in French History and Culture combines fresh, creative re-interpretation of familiar texts with exciting new explorations of neglected historical episodes and cultures. It is a landmark of meticulous scholarship and rigorous theoretical analysis, and a vital resource for scholars of queer theory, French history and culture, and literary criticism.
Download or read book Women s Writing 1660 1830 written by Jennie Batchelor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about mapping the future of eighteenth-century women’s writing and feminist literary history, in an academic culture that is not shy of declaring their obsolescence. It asks: what can or should unite us as scholars devoted to the recovery and study of women’s literary history in an era of big data, on the one hand, and ever more narrowly defined specialization, on the other? Leading scholars from the UK and US answer this question in thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary and often polemical essays. Contributors attend to the achievements of eighteenth-century women writers and the scholars who have devoted their lives to them, and map new directions for the advancement of research in the area. They collectively argue that eighteenth-century women’s literary history has a future, and that feminism was, and always should be, at its heart. Featuring a Preface by Isobel Grundy, and a Postscript by Cora Kaplan.
Download or read book Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography written by Heidi L. Pennington and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.
Download or read book The Novel An Alternative History 1600 1800 written by Steven Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 1025 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Having excavated the world's earliest novels in his previous book, literary historian Steven Moore explores in this sequel the remarkable flowering of the novel between the years 1600 and 1800-from Don Quixote to America's first big novel, an homage to Cervantes entitled Modern Chivalry. This is the period of such classic novels as Tom Jones, Candide, and Dangerous Liaisons, but beyond the dozen or so recognized classics there are hundreds of other interesting novels that appeared then, known only to specialists: Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, massive Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English novels, and the earliest American novels. These minor novels are not only interesting in their own right, but also provide the context needed to appreciate why the major novels were major breakthroughs. The novel experienced an explosive growth spurt during these centuries as novelists experimented with different forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips, and family sagas, along with quirky, unclassifiable experiments in fiction that resemble contemporary, avant-garde works. As in his previous volume, Moore privileges the innovators and outriders, those who kept the novel novel. In the most comprehensive history of this period ever written, Moore examines over 400 novels from around the world in a lively style that is as entertaining as it is informative. Though written for a general audience, The Novel, An Alternative History also provides the scholarly apparatus required by the serious student of the period. This sequel, like its predecessor, is a “zestfully encyclopedic, avidly opinionated, and dazzlingly fresh history of the most 'elastic' of literary forms” (Booklist).
Download or read book The Cambridge History of French Literature written by William Burgwinkle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 823 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Occitan poetry to Francophone writing produced in the Caribbean and North Africa, from intellectual history to current films, and from medieval manuscripts to bandes dessinées, this History covers French literature from its beginnings to the present day. With equal attention to all genres, historical periods and registers, this is the most comprehensive guide to literature written in French ever produced in English, and the first in decades to offer such an array of topics and perspectives. Contributors attend to issues of orality, history, peripheries, visual culture, alterity, sexuality, religion, politics, autobiography and testimony. The result is a collection that, despite the wide variety of topics and perspectives, presents a unified view of the richness of French-speaking cultures. This History gives support to the idea that French writing will continue to prosper in the twenty-first century as it adapts, adds to, and refocuses the rich legacy of its past.
Download or read book Going Public written by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the ways in which French women went public through publication, this book shows how they contributed to the formation of the public sphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Going Public also takes the critical literature on the woman writer to a new level by examining the implications of print publicity. The contributors investigate the intersection of gender and publicity in a wide range of printed texts, from memoirs and legal briefs to novels, poems, and fairy tales. In doing so they reveal much about why individual women drawn from the whole spectrum of society embraced the medium of print and about the impact this form of publicity had on their lives.
Download or read book A History of Women s Writing in France written by Sonya Stephens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume was the first historical introduction to women's writing in France from the sixth century to the present day. Specially-commissioned essays by leading scholars provide an introduction in English to the wealth and diversity of French women writers, offering fascinating readings and perspectives. The volume as a whole offers a cohesive history of women's writing which has sometimes been obscured by the canonisation of a small feminine elite. Each chapter focuses on a given period and a range of writers, taking account of prevailing sexual ideologies and women's activities in, or their relation to, the social, political, economic and cultural surroundings. Complemented by an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works and a biographical guide to more than one hundred and fifty women writers, it represents an invaluable resource for those wishing to discover or extend their knowledge of French literature written by women.
