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This study challenges the conventional view of Rétif de la Bretonne as a chronicler of eighteenth-century France and notorious exponent of 'la littérature galante', to provide both students and scholars with a fresh analysis focusing on two themes -- autobiography and utopianism -- which feature prominently in his writing. It suggests that each is the product of similar impulses, reflecting common polarities between public and private, self and others, past and future. In tracing Rétif's persistent but frustrated attempts to reconcile the conflicting elements of the world he inhabits -- rural and urban, old and new, stable and changing -- this volume analyses the failure of his utopian dream of a well-ordered and harmonious society. By exploring his absorption in the autobiographical project, and in particular Monsieur Nicolas ou le coeur humain dévoilé, it offers an interpretation of his work as a sustained reflection on selfhood and on the power of memory which enables Rétif to create, within the confines of the text, a utopian space where self and world are reconciled, and time and space no longer count.
Though Colette's novels have been thought sentimental and she herself has earned a certain notoriety as a decadent sensualist, Nicole Ward Jouve argues that we need to look closely at Colette's work again, and with the hindsight of feminist theory, to rediscover that inimitable talent for the inscription of sensual and familial pleasure.
Edited and with an introduction by Robert PhelpsThe hundred short stories collected here include such masterpieces as 'Bella-Vista', 'The Tender Shoot' and 'Le K-pi', Colette's subtle and ruthless rendering of a woman's belated sexual awakening. Shot through with the colours and flavours of the Parisian world and fertile French countryside, these short stories reverberate with the fine-spun desire, wit and psychological acuity that made Colette unique.
In the late nineteenth century, the first wave of female journalists began writing in the French daily press. Yet, while they undeniably opened doors for the next generations of educated women, sexist hiring practices, assumptions about women’s aptitudes as reporters, and more subtle gender biases continued to saturate the industry in the decades that followed. Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940 investigates the careers and written work of ten women who regularly reported in the national, Paris-based dailies. Addressing the role of mentorship, family connections, gendered behaviours, reporting styles, and subject matter, Mary Lynn Stewart debunks lingering essentiali...
A definitive biography offers insight into the life and work of novelist Colette and provides accounts of Colette's celebration of sexual pleasure in her writing, her three marriages, and her state funeral, the first for a woman in France.
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‘A biography as sensuously satisfying as a fine French meal. Colette surely would have approved it as much for its aesthetic appeal as for its rare insight and scholarship.’ Robyn Davidson Colette’s France is the remarkable life story of an extraordinary woman, who was known simply as ‘Colette’. This lavishly illustrated biography of the French writer, who was as famous for her novels as for her often controversial life, follows her journey through the landscapes of France where she lived and loved – from a childhood in Burgundy and coming of age in the Belle Époque Paris, to Provence and St Tropez. Jane Gilmour recounts the varied lives of a sensual, artistic, rebellious woman ...