Download or read book Female Intimacies in Seventeenth Century French Literature written by Marianne Legault and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining literary discourses on female friendship and intimacy in seventeenth-century France, this study takes as its premise the view that, unlike men, women have been denied for centuries the possibility of same sex friendship. The author explores the effect of this homosocial and homopriviledged heritage on the deployment and constructions of female friendship and homoerotic relationships as thematic narratives in works by male and female writers in seventeenth-century France. The book consists of three parts: the first surveys the history of male thinkers' denial of female friendship, concluding with a synopsis of the cultural representations of female same-sex practices. The second analyzes female intimacy and homoerotism as imagined, appropriated and finally repudiated by Honoré d'Urfé's pastoral novel, L'Astrée, and Isaac de Benserade's seemingly lesbian-friendly comedy, Iphis et Iante. The third turns to unprecedented depictions of female intimate and homoerotic bonds in Madeleine de Scudéry's novel Mathilde and Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force's fairy tale Plus Belle que Fée. This study reveals a female literary genealogy of intimacies between women in seventeenth-century France, and adds to the research in lesbian and queer studies, fields in which pre-eighteenth-century French literary texts are rare.

Download or read book Love Power and Gender in Seventeenth Century French Fairy Tales written by Bronwyn Reddan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love is a key ingredient in the stereotypical fairy-tale ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. This romantic formula continues to influence contemporary ideas about love and marriage, but it ignores the history of love as an emotion that shapes and is shaped by hierarchies of power including gender, class, education, and social status. This interdisciplinary study questions the idealization of love as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the conteuses, the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue in the 1690s, used the fairy-tale genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage. Their tales do not sit comfortably in the fairy-tale canon as they explore the good, the bad, and the ugly effects of love and marriage on the lives of their heroines. Bronwyn Reddan argues that the conteuses' scripts for love emphasize the importance of gender in determining the "right" way to love in seventeenth-century France. Their version of fairy-tale love is historical and contingent rather than universal and timeless. This conversation about love compels revision of the happily-ever-after narrative and offers incisive commentary on the gendered scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France.

Download or read book Republic of Women written by Carol Pal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Republic of Women recaptures a lost chapter in the narrative of intellectual history. It tells the story of a transnational network of female scholars who were active members of the seventeenth-century republic of letters and demonstrates that this intellectual commonwealth was a much more eclectic and diverse assemblage than has been assumed. These seven scholars - Anna Maria van Schurman, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Marie de Gournay, Marie du Moulin, Dorothy Moore, Bathsua Makin and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh - were philosophers, schoolteachers, reformers and mathematicians. They hailed from England, Ireland, Germany, France and the Netherlands, and together with their male colleagues - men like Descartes, Huygens, Hartlib and Montaigne - they represented the spectrum of contemporary approaches to science, faith, politics and the advancement of learning. Carol Pal uses their collective biography to reconfigure the intellectual biography of early modern Europe, offering a new, expanded analysis of the seventeenth-century community of ideas.

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 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume covers 30 Pre-Revolutionary French women, providing a representative sampling of their manifold and varied contributions to intellectual and cultural history. This volume is unique in its grouping of essentially French writers from the Pre-Revolutionary period. The authors included here range from those prominent because of their social position or literary fame, to those slowly becoming part of a new canon of Old Regime women writers - authors whose works were known to their contemporaries but who have slipped into near invisibility in the following centuries until their recent rediscovery and reassessment.

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 Women in the Fine Arts from the Seventh Century B C to the Twentieth Century A D written by Clara Erskine Clement Waters and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In studying the subject of this book I have found the names of more than a thousand women whose attainments in the Fine Arts—in various countries and at different periods of time before the middle of the nineteenth century—entitle them to honorable mention as artists, and I doubt not that an exhaustive search would largely increase this number. The stories of many of these women have been written with more or less detail, while of others we know little more than their names and the titles of a few of their works; but even our scanty knowledge of them is of value. Of the army of women artists of the last century it is not yet possible to speak with judgment and justice, although many have executed works of which all women may be proud. We have some knowledge of women artists in ancient days. Few stories of that time are so authentic as that of Kora, who made the design for the first bas-relief, in the city of Sicyonia, in the seventh century B. C. We have the names of other Greek women artists of the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, but we know little of their lives and works. Calypso was famous for the excellence of her character pictures, a remarkable one being a portrait of Theodorus, the Juggler. A picture found at Pompeii, now at Naples, is attributed to this artist; but its authorship is so uncertain that little importance can be attached to it. Pliny praised Eirene, among whose pictures was one of "An Aged Man" and a portrait of "Alcisthenes, the Dancer." In the annals of Roman Art we find few names of women. For this reason Laya, who lived about a century before the Christian era, is important. She is honored as the original painter of miniatures, and her works on ivory were greatly esteemed. Pliny says she did not marry, but pursued her art with absolute devotion; and he considered her pictures worthy of great praise. A large picture in Naples is said to be the work of Laya, but, as in the case of Calypso, we have no assurance that it is genuine. It is also said that Laya's portraits commanded larger prices than those of Sopolis and Dyonisius, the most celebrated portrait painters of their time. Our scanty knowledge of individual women artists of antiquity—mingled with fable as it doubtless is—serves the important purpose of proving that women, from very ancient times, were educated as artists and creditably followed their profession beside men of the same periods. This knowledge also awakens imagination, and we wonder in what other ancient countries there were women artists. We know that in Egypt inheritances descended in the female line, as in the case of the Princess Karamat; and since we know of the great architectural works of Queen Hashop and her journey to the land of Punt, we may reasonably assume that the women of ancient Egypt had their share in all the interests of life. Were there not artists among them who decorated temples and tombs with their imperishable colors? Did not women paint those pictures of Isis—goddess of Sothis—that are like precursors of the pictures of the Immaculate Conception? Surely we may hope that a papyrus will be brought to light that will reveal to us the part that women had in the decoration of the monuments of ancient Egypt. At present we have no reliable records of the lives and works of women artists before the time of the Renaissance in Italy.

Download or read book Gender Authenticity and the Missive Letter in Eighteenth century France written by Mary McAlpin and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study will particularly appeal to scholars of gender studies, but will also interest eighteenth-century specialists, reader-response critics, and any critic interested in the epistolary genre. Dr. McAlpin compares the evidence of de La Tour's authorial consciousness with that of far better known letter writers, both women (Sevigne, Graffigny, Lespinasse, Roland, Suzanne Necker) and men (Boswell, in particular). The book also introduces the exchange of letters to the English-speaking community of eighteenth-century scholars. While the de La Tour-Rousseau exchange was republished in French in 1998, it is not yet available in English. This book provides translations of the first, most significant letters in its appendix."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Selected Writings of an Eighteenth Century Venetian Woman of Letters written by Elisabetta Caminer Turra and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elisabetta Caminer Turra (1751-96) was one of the most prominent women in eighteenth-century Italy and a central figure in the international "Republic of Letters." A journalist and publisher, Caminer participated in important debates on capital punishment, freedom of the press, and the abuse of clerical power. She also helped spread Enlightenment ideas into Italy by promoting and publishing Voltaire's latest works and translating new European plays-plays she herself directed, to great applause, on Venetian stages. Bringing together Caminer's letters, poems, and journalistic writings, nearly all published for the first time here, Selected Writings offers readers an intellectual biography of this remarkable figure as well as a glimpse into her intimate correspondence with the most prominent thinkers of her day. But more important, Selected Writings provides insight into the passion that animated Caminer's fervent reflections on the complex and shifting condition of women in her society-the same passion that pushed her to succeed in the male-dominated literary professions.

Download or read book Women s Letters Across Europe 1400 1700 written by Jane Couchman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In response to a growing interest, among historians as well as literary critics, in women's use of the epistolary genre, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion analyzes persuasive techniques in the personal correspondence of late medieval and early modern women. It includes studies of well-known women (Isabella d'Este, Teresa of Avila, Marguerite de Navarre, Catherine de Medicis), of those less-known (Alessandra Macigni Strozzi, Louise de Coligny, Glikl of Hameln, Argula von Grumbach, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Anna Maria von Schurman, Barbara of Brandenburg ) and of others virtually unknown to history (prosperous women like Elizabeth Stonor and Cornelia Collonello and pauper women seeking poor relief in Tours). Comprehensive in scope, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700 looks at women from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and from various levels of society, encompassing the nobility, the gentry, the middle class, and the poor. Each of the essayists considers letters both as historical documents giving insights into women's lives, and as texts in which variations on epistolary forms are used for specific persuasive purposes. The authors of the essays analyze their subjects' capabilities and limitations as letter writers and the techniques they used to influence correspondents, setting these observations in the framework of the women's particular 'stories.' Taken together, the essays and the letter writers discussed therein illustrate in new ways how far from silenced many early modern women were, how they were able to adopt and adapt strategies from the epistolary conventions available to them, and how they could have an impact on their worlds through their letters.

Download or read book Against Marriage written by Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In seventeenth-century France, aristocratic women were valued by their families as commodities to be married off in exchange for money, social advantage, or military alliance. Once married, they became legally subservient to their husbands. The duchesse de Montpensier—a first cousin of Louis XIV—was one of very few exceptions, thanks to the vast wealth she inherited from her mother, who died shortly after Montpensier was born. She was also one of the few politically powerful women in France at the time to have been an accomplished writer. In the daring letters presented in this bilingual edition, Montpensier condemns the alliance system of marriage, proposing instead to found a republic that she would govern, "a corner of the world in which . . . women are their own mistresses," and where marriage and even courtship would be outlawed. Her pastoral utopia would provide medical care and vocational training for the poor, and all the homes would have libraries and studies, so that each woman would have a "room of her own" in which to write books. Joan DeJean's lively introduction and accessible translation of Montpensier's letters—four previously unpublished—allow us unprecedented access to the courageous voice of this extraordinary woman.

Download or read book Writing Love written by Katharine Ann Jensen and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling new addition to Sandra M. Gilbert's Ad Feminam: Women and Literature series, Katharine Ann Jensen examines the cultural form of the love letter and its intersection with the novel in the works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French women writers. Traditionally, French literary history has focused on eighteenth-century male writers Rousseau and Laclos as the master artists of the epistolary novel. That emphasis on one century, one gender, and one epistolary form--the novel--obscures the history of women's writing in France. In the seventeenth century, the love letter was viewed as a feminine literary form in which a woman's passionate and emotional "nature" found its logical expression. Such emotional writing was criticized for its structural and grammatical imperfections, rendering it--in the eyes of men--invalid as true "literary" material. However, men often wrote under female pseudonyms, composing letters of seduction and betrayal that were published as true accounts. Jensen contends that men disguised their words as women's words because writing as women allowed them to experiment with narrative fiction at a time when men's writing was rigidly defined by classical rhetoric. She further argues that men were able to moderate women's linguistic strengths by limiting their epistolary expertise to a social, rather than literary, practice, thereby maintaining literature as an almost exclusively male province. Jensen argues for a tradition of women's writing by examining both the love letters and novels of such writers as Desjardins, Ferrand, Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Lespinasse. In her novel Les Désordres de l'amour, Desjardins (Madame de Villedieu) creates an ambitious, letter-writing heroine. Through an analysis of the textual similarities between the heroine's letters and Desjardins's personal love letters to her unfaithful lover, Jensen concludes that Desjardins rewrites her own unfortunate epistolary relationship. Jensen draws similar conclusions from an examination of the personal letters of Ferrand in relation to her novel Histoire des amours de Cléante et de Bélise. In order to chart the legacy of seventeenth-century feminine epistolarity, Jensen goes on to consider the works of eighteenth-century French women writers. Like Desjardins's novel, Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistress Fanni Butlerd present letter-writing heroines who overturn the conventions of seduction and betrayal in order to claim their independence and desire to write. This desire correlates to Graffigny's and Riccoboni's own writing ambitions, thereby asserting the ability of women to write self-consciously, rather than emotionally, and to create narrative fiction rather than cyclical letters of love and suffering. Jensen demonstrates that these assertions constitute a significant break with seventeenth-century ideas about feminine letter writing that inextricably bind women to a supposedly natural language of sexual and literary disempowerment. This important and insightful book will prove a valuable addition to the libraries of scholars in French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies, feminist studies, epistolary fiction, and novel and narrative studies.

Download or read book Towards an Equality of the Sexes in Early Modern France written by Derval Conroy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-02-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume sets out to examine the ways in which an equality between the sexes is constructed, conceptualised, imagined or realised in early modern France, a period and a country which produced some of the earliest theorisations on equality. In so doing, it aims to contribute towards the development of the history of equality as an intellectual category within the history of political thought, and to situate "the woman question" within that history. The eleven chapters in the volume span the fields of political theory, philosophy, literature, history and history of ideas, bringing together literary scholars, historians, philosophers and scholars of political thought, and examining an extensive range of primary sources. Whilst most of the chapters focus on the conceptualisation of a moral, metaphysical or intellectual equality between the sexes, space is also given to concrete examples of a de facto gender equality in operation. The volume is aimed at scholars and graduate students of political thought, history of philosophy, women’s history and gender studies alike. It aims to throw light on the history of Western ideas of equality and difference, questions which continue to preoccupy cultural historians, philosophers, political theorists and feminist critics.

Download or read book Epistolary Community in Print 1580 1664 written by Diana G. Barnes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epistolary Community in Print contends that the printed letter is an inherently sociable genre ideally suited to the theorisation of community in early modern England. In manual, prose or poetic form, printed letter collections make private matters public, and in so doing reveal, first how tenuous is the divide between these two realms in the early modern period and, second, how each collection helps to constitute particular communities of readers. Consequently, as Epistolary Community details, epistolary visions of community were gendered. This book provides a genealogy of epistolary discourse beginning with an introductory discussion of Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser’s Wise and Wittie Letters (1580), and opening into chapters on six printed letter collections generated at times of political change. Among the authors whose letters are examined are Angel Day, Michael Drayton, Jacques du Bosque and Margaret Cavendish. Epistolary Community identifies broad patterns that were taking shape, and constantly morphing, in English printed letters from 1580 to 1664, and then considers how the six examples of printed letters selected for discussion manipulate this generic tradition to articulate ideas of community under specific historical and political circumstances. This study makes a substantial contribution to the rapidly growing field of early modern letters, and demonstrates how the field impacts our understanding of political discourses in circulation between 1580 and 1664, early modern women’s writing, print culture and rhetoric.

Download or read book Women Gender and Enlightenment written by B. Taylor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-27 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.

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 The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare written by R. Malcolm Smuts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on the period of Shakespeare's career that will assist and stimulate scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than merely attempting to summarize the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, individual chapters seek to exemplify a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies currently used in historical research on the early modern period that can inform close analysis of literature. Different sections examine political history at both the national and local levels; relationships between intellectual culture and the early modern political imagination; relevant aspects of religious and social history; and facets of the histories of architecture, the visual arts, and music. Topics treated include the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere' and its relationship to drama during Shakespeare's lifetime; the role of historical narratives in shaping the period's views on the workings of politics; attitudes about the role of emotion in social life; cultures of honour and shame and the rituals and literary forms through which they found expression; crime and murder; and visual expressions of ideas of moral disorder and natural monstrosity, in printed images as well as garden architecture.

Download or read book Letterwriting in Renaissance England written by Folger Shakespeare Library and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduces in full size and transcribes a number of letters from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries