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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.
A valuable survey and reference resource It is hard to imagine a more needed and more useful literary reference work than this one, which gives students and readers quick access to the lives and work of a wide range of notable female writers from England and the Continent, from Aphra Behn to Emily Bronte, from Simone de Beauvoir to Isak Dinesen, from Bridget of Sweden to Hannah Arendt. Writers in more than 30 languages are included: French, Czech, Greek, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Serbian, Catalan, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, and more. Covers 1,500 years and all major genres Going back 15 centuries, the Encyclopedia covers the authors of n...
"The articles that appear in this collection were presented as papers at the Cambridge Annual French Graduate Conference held at King's College, Cambridge in April 2008"--P. [xi].
The second half of the seventeenth century marked the first major breakthrough for women playwrights in France, as some of them succeeded in getting their works staged, published and taken seriously by critics and authority figures. The four works included here, translated into English for the first time, represent the diversity of genres cultivated by these writers, while reflecting both the cultural milieu of the era and a concern for the status of women. Françoise Pascal's Endymion, a tragicomedy with special effects, daringly reexamines a classical myth. Marie-Catherine Desjardins's Nitetis, a historical tragedy, focuses on the plight of a virtuous and astute queen married to an evil tyrant. Antoinette Deshoulières's Genseric, also a historical tragedy, rejects prevailing models of male heroism and of conventional tragic plots. Catherine Durand's proverb comedies contain a scathing critique of aristocratic mores and give voice to women's desires for emancipation.
Written at the end of the Counter Reformation, Francoise Pascal ́s first play, Agathonphie martyr, tragi-comedie (1655), is an important transitional piece, marking the passage from religious drama as a moralizing device to that of a diversion, prompted by the growing influence of the société mondaine in Lyon. In her introduction, Kennedy examines how this play is characterized by a unique merging of two genres: the tragicomedy and the martyr play. This play also merits our attention in terms of new female characterization. Kenedy demonstrates how Pascal ́s female martyr Triphine diverges from the traditionally "coldhearted" female martyr, as an independent thinker who speaks her heart, proclaiming the virtues of "constant" love.
This wide-ranging examination of the genres of early modern women's writing embraces translation in the fields of theological discourse, romance and classical tragedy, original meditations and prayers, letters and diaries, poetry, closet drama, advice manuals, and prophecies and polemics.