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Thinking through the Mothers
If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms that must be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in fact have any greater access to their own mothers' lives than to the lives of other women whose stories have been swept away like dust in the debris of the past? In Thinking through the Mothers, Janet Beizer surveys modern women's biographies and contemplates alternatives to an approach based in lineage and the form of thought that emphasizes the line, the path, h...
The Harlequin Eaters
How representations of the preparation, sale, and consumption of leftovers in nineteenth-century urban France link socioeconomic and aesthetic history The concept of the "harlequin" refers to the practice of reassembling dinner scraps cleared from the plates of the wealthy to sell, replated, to the poor in nineteenth-century Paris. In The Harlequin Eaters, Janet Beizer investigates how the alimentary harlequin evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the earlier, similarly patchworked Commedia dell'arte Harlequin character and can be used to rethink the entangled place of class, race, and food in the longer history of modernism. By superimposing figurations of the edible ...
The Poetics of Death
Discusses literary representations of death to explore the relation between writing and death--death understood as both the death of the individual and the death of meaning.
Sexing the Mind
Sexing the Mind looks at scenes of hysteria in works by George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, and Henry James, as well as in the writings of Sigmund Freud, showing how these texts represent distinctive attempts to break loose from erotic, political, and epistemological models of Victorian masculinity and femininity. Through her approach, which is both closely textual (reading against the grain in psychoanalytic and feminist fashion) and historical (retracing in medical and literary texts the manifestations of hysteria), Ender uncovers a series of discursive structures that "engender" the modern subject. Her book probes the interplay of writing, subjectivity, and sexual identity, and succeeds in showing how the nineteenth-century view of hysteria, from Sand to the early Freud, displays the competing claims of male/female consciousness.
Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-century French Literature and Culture
From Sade at one end of the nineteenth century to Freud at the other, via many French novelists and poets, pleasure and pain become ever more closely entwined. Whereas the inseparability of these themes has hitherto been studied from isolated perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, sadism and sado-masochism, melancholy, or post-structuralist textualjouissance, the originality of this collaborative volume lies in its exploration of how pleasure and pain function across a broader range of contexts. The essays collected here demonstrate how the complex relationship between pleasure and pain plays a vital role in structuring nineteenth-century thinking in prose fiction (Balzac, Flaubert, Musset, M...
Being Contemporary
A collection of 23 riveting essays on aspects of contemporary French culture by the superstars of the field.
Accessories to Modernity
Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period. As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the c...
Wild Colonial Girl
Since the 1960 publication of her first novel, The Country Girls, award-winning Irish writer Edna O'Brien has been both celebrated and maligned. Praised for her lyrical prose and vivid female characters and attacked for her frank treatment of sexuality and alleged sensationalism, O'Brien and her work seem always to spawn controversy, including the past banning in Ireland of several of her works. O'Brien's attention to "women's" concerns such as sex, romance, marriage, and childbirth has often relegated her to critical neglect at best and, at worst, outright contempt. This essay collection promises to be a long overdue critical reevaluation and exciting rediscovery of her oeuvre. Wild Colonial Girl situates O'Brien in Irish contexts that allow for an appraisal of her significant contribution to a specifically Irish women's literary tradition while attesting to the potency of writing against patriarchal conventions. Each chapter's clear and detailed readings of O'Brien's fiction build a convincing case for her literary, political, and cultural importance, providing an invaluable critical guide for an enriched appreciation of O'Brien and her work.
