Tender Geographies

Download or read book Tender Geographies written by Joan E. DeJean and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tender Geographies offers a new version of literary history by arguing that French women writers were the originators of the modern novel. Joan DeJean exposes the gender politics of canon formation in France.During what is considered the Great Century of French Letters (1630-1715), women writers were active in numbers unheard of before or since. Featuring the best known early women novelists--ScudA(c)ry and Lafayette-- Tender Geographies repositions literary women in their contemporary context. DeJean demonstrates that women's writing was widely thought to convey a politically and socially subversive vision. Originally considered a threat to Church and State, women's novels were deliberately represented as innocent love stories by the first official literary historians and subsequently consigned to oblivion. DeJean demonstrates that the novel owes its origins to a thoroughly political act; the decision by women to make the genre a revolutionary force.

Download or read book Crossing Boundaries written by Jane Donawerth and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the proceedings from the 1997 symposium "Attending to Early Modern Women: Crossing Boundaries, " which was sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. It provides a detailed overview of current research in early modern women's studies.

Download or read book Writing Ambition written by Katharine Ann Jensen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-12-13 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France, Katharine Ann Jensen analyzes the work of three pairs of women writing in French—Genlis and Lafayette, Colette and Annie de Pène, and Nancy Huson and Leïla Sebbar—to assess how their literary ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on the psychological aspects of the women’s relationships, the author combines close textual readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about literary ambition.

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 228 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 The Invisible Code written by William M. Reddy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Download or read book Imagining Early Modern Histories written by Elizabeth Ketner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpreting textual mediations of history in early modernity, this volume adds nuance to our understanding of the contributions fiction and fictionalizing make to the shape and texture of versions of and debates about history during that period. Geographically, the scope of the essays extends beyond Europe and England to include Asia and Africa. Contributors take a number of different approaches to understand the relationship between history, fiction, and broader themes in early modern culture. They analyze the ways fiction writers use historical sources, fictional texts translate ideas about the past into a vernacular accessible to broad audiences, fictional depictions and interpretations shape historical action, and the ways in which nonfictional texts and accounts were given fictional histories of their own, intentionally or not, through transmission and interpretation. By combining the already contested idea of fiction with performance, action, and ideas/ideology, this collection provides a more thorough consideration of fictional histories in the early modern period. It also covers more than two centuries of primary material, providing a longer perspective on the changing and complex role of history in forming early modern national, gendered, and cultural identities.

Download or read book Moved by Love written by Mary D. Sheriff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eighteenth-century France, the ability to lose oneself in a character or scene marked both great artists and ideal spectators. Yet it was thought this same passionate enthusiasm, if taken to unreasonable extremes, could also lead to sexual deviance, mental illness—even death. Women and artists were seen as especially susceptible to these negative consequences of creative enthusiasm, and women artists, doubly so. Mary D. Sheriff uses these very different visions of enthusiasm to explore the complex interrelationships among creativity, sexuality, the body and the mind in eighteenth-century France. Drawing on evidence from the visual arts, literature, philosophy, and medicine, she portrays the deviance ascribed to both inspired men and women. But while various mythologies worked to normalize deviance in male artists, women had no justification for their deviance. For instance, the mythical sculptor Pygmalion was cured of an abnormal love for his statue through the making of art. He became a model for creative artists, living happily with his statue come to life. No happy endings, though, were imagined for such inspired women writers as Sappho and Heloise, who burned with erotomania their art could not quench. Even so, Sheriff demonstrates, the perceived connections among sexuality, creativity, and disease also opened artistic opportunities for creative women took full advantage of them. Brilliantly reassessing the links between sexuality and creativity, artistic genius and madness, passion and reason, Moved by Love will profoundly reshape our view of eighteenth- century French culture.