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Women Writing Antiquity argues that the struggle to define the female intellectual in seventeenth-century France lay at the centre of a broader struggle over the definition of literature and literary knowledge during a time of significant cultural change. As the female intellectual became a figure of debate, France was also undergoing a shift away from the dominance of classical cultural models, the transition towards a standardized modern language, the development of a national literature and literary canon, and the emergence of the literary field. This book explores the intersection of these phenomena, analyzing how a range of women constructed the female intellectual through their recepti...
Helena Taylor explores responses to the life of the ancient Roman poet, Ovid, within the charged atmosphere of seventeenth-century France. She investigates how the figure of Ovid was used to debate literary taste and modernity, and in doing so offers a fresh perspective on classical reception: its paradoxes, uses, and quarrels.
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.
Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as “literary slumming”, or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugène François Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and Émile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.
Beggars, outcasts, urchins, waifs, prostitutes, criminals, convicts, madmen, fallen women, lunatics, degenerates—part reality, part fantasy, these are the grotesque faces that populate the underworld, the dark inverse of our everyday world. Lurking in the mirror that we hold up to our society, they are our counterparts and our doubles, repelling us and yet offering the tantalizing promise of escape. Although these images testify to undeniable social realities, the sordid lower depths make up a symbolic and social imaginary that reflects our fears and anxieties—as well as our desires. In Vice, Crime, and Poverty, Dominique Kalifa traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld ...
Text in English with some contributions in French.
This book features an extraordinary album of ornament designs by the French architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742). For the first time, this publication reproduces in their initial state the embellishments Oppenord drew over the first French edition of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia. In lieu of a haphazard succession of sketches, it reveals Oppenord's fascinating interplay between text, engraved and drawn images, one patterned on the art of conversation and the linguistic games cultivated in elite Parisian circles.
Eine umfassende, theologisch, kultur- und literaturgeschichtlich kontextualisierte Geschichte des Lachens im Frankreich des 17. Jahrhunderts. Ausgehend von den knappen Harangues (1651), den burlesken Totenreden eines Autors, der sich hinter dem programmatischen Pseudonym Raisonnable verbirgt, erschließt die Arbeit anhand der Schlüsselelemente Tod und Lachen das geistige und kulturelle Zentrum des grand siècle. Es ist dies die konfliktreiche Opposition zwischen der theologisch-religiösen Kultur, die ihre traditionelle Vorrangstellung erhalten will, und der literarisch-profanen Kultur der Moderne, die sich um einen eigenen Autonomiestatus bemüht. Der kulturwissenschaftliche Ansatz der Arbeit eröffnet einen neuen Blick auf die Traktatliteratur, die Predigt und insbesondere das Theater des 17. Jahrhunderts.
Don Quijote and Le Berger extravagant criticize fiction but come in the shape of novels. Far from breaking with their respective traditions, they engage with the chivalric and the pastoral in a creative manner. Genre and imitation are key notions for assessing the status of the novels within literary history and the œuvres of Cervantes and Sorel. With emphasis on the continuity of each writer’s approach, Le Berger extravagant is considered in the context of Sorel’s aim to educate readers and avoid romance stereotypes, while the Quijote is read as an individual take on the chivalric novel, rejecting the Spanish tradition in favor of the ironic Italian romanzo cavalleresco. Like Cervantes’ Galatea and Persiles, Don Quijote reflects a specific tradition which in turn serves to illuminate the famous book. This study offers interpretations of the two novels, but extends its scope toward the authors’ other works and additional contemporary sources including Avellaneda’s 1614 continuation of Don Quijote.
Dans les dernières années de sa vie, Scarron a beau être cloué sur sa chaise de paralytique, sa plume alerte n'a rien perdu de son allégresse ni de sa vivacité: dans le Roman comique, les tribulations d’une troupe de théâtre au Mans sont l’occasion d’une fantaisie romanesque foisonnante, où les anecdotes de taverne et les scènes de farce alternent avec les nouvelles sentimentales et les histoires de pirates. Grands seigneurs méchants hommes, belles dames mystérieuses, hommes de loi véreux et comédiennes trop séduisantes constituent le personnel hétéroclite et haut en couleurs d’aventures trépidantes au rythme échevelé, bâties sur de permanentes ruptures de ton. C...