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The first half of the book is a detailed study of how the salons influenced the development of literature. Beasley argues that many women were not only writers, they also served as critics for the literary sphere as a whole. In the second half of the book Beasley examines how historians and literary critics subsequently portrayed the seventeenth century literary realm, which became identified with the great reign of Louis XIV and designated the official canon of French literature. Beasley argues that in a rewriting of this past, the salons were reconfigured in order to advance an alternative view of this premier moment of French culture and of the literary masterpieces that developed out of it. Through her analysis of how the seventeenth century salon has been defined and transmitted to posterity, Beasley illuminates facets of France's collective memory, and the powers that constituted it in the past and that are still working to define it today.
Rori Bloom demonstrates that Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1652–1705) and Henriette-Julie de Murat (1670–1716) changed the stakes of the fairy tale: instead of inviting their readers to marvel at the magic that changes rags to riches, they enjoined them to acknowledge the skill that transforms raw materials into beautifully made works of art.
Marvelous Transformations is an anthology of tales and original critical essays that moves beyond canonized “classics” and old paradigms, documenting the points of historical connection between literary tales and field-based collections. This innovative anthology reflects current interdisciplinary scholarship on oral traditions and the cultural history of the print fairy tale. In addition to the tales, original critical essays, newly written for this volume, introduce readers to differing perspectives on key ideas in the field.
This collection explores for the first time the importance of secret history in the literature of the long eighteenth century.
The original edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, published in 2005, was a pathbreaking work of early modern literary history, exploring women’s role in the rise of the fairy tale and their use of this new genre to carve out roles as major contributors to the literature of their time. This new edition, with a new introduction and a forward by acclaimed scholar Allison Stedman, emphasizes the scholarly legacy of Anne Duggan’s original work, and its continuing field-changing implications. The book studies the works of two of the most prolific seventeenth-century women writers, Madeleine de Scudéry and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. Analyzing their use of the novel, the chronicle, and ...
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.
Bronwyn Reddan challenges the idealization of fairy-tale romance as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue, the conteuses, used the genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage.
Goldstein shows how the connection between Vaux and Versailles is at the heart of classical style. She retraces the roots of Versailles in Fouquet's short-lived experiment, and destabilises any easy understanding of the court of the Sun King as the origin of French national style.
Translators’ contribution to the vitality of textual production in the Renaissance is still often vastly underestimated. Drawing on a wide variety of sources published in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, German, English, and Zapotec, this volume brings a global perspective to the history of translators, and the printed book. Together the essays point out the extent to which particular language cultures were liable to shift, overlap, shrink, and expand during one of the most defining periods in the history of print culture. Interdisciplinary in approach, Trust and Proof investigates translators’ role in the diffusion of discourse about languages and ancient knowledge, as well as changing etiquettes of reading and writing.
Revealing Bodies turns to the eighteenth century to ask a question with continuing relevance: what kinds of knowledge condition our understanding of our own bodies? Focusing on the tension between particularity and generality that inheres in intellectual discourse about the body, Revealing Bodies explores the disconnection between the body understood as a general form available to knowledge and the body experienced as particularly one's own. Erin Goss locates this division in contemporary bodily exhibits, such as Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, and in eighteenth-century anatomical discourse. Her readings of the corporeal aesthetics of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, William Blake's co...