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Stendhal, George Sand, Rachilde, Georges Bataille: Forgoing the patronym, with its weight of meaning, these modern French writers renamed themselves in their work. Their use of pseudonyms, as Maryline Lukacher demonstrates in this provocative study, is part of a process to subvert the name of the father and explore the suppressed relation to the figure of the mother. Combining psychoanalytic criticism, feminist theory, and literary analysis, Maternal Fictions offers a complex psychological portrait of these writers who managed at once to challenge patriarchal authority and at the same time attempt to return to the maternal. Through readings of Armance, Le Rouge et le noir, La Vie de Henry Br...
Drawing on psychoanalytic studies of mourning, from Freud and Melanie Klein, to Donald Winnicott and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Beauty Raises the Dead examines the unique way in which the Decadents defined loss as a precondition to literacy creation."--BOOK JACKET.
This study examines author/audience relations in the works of the seventeenth-century French poet Jean de La Fontaine. Focusing on the Fables, Les Amours de Psyche et de Cupidon, and the Contes, Anne L. Birberick explores how La Fontaine remains a largely subversive artist, even while he seeks to establish himself within a conventional system of literary patronage. Birberick offers an "anatomy" of readers as she shows how La Fontaine simultaneously appeals to multiple readers whose tastes range from the literal to the ironic, from the orthodox to the heterodox. To negotiate successfully between and among such diverse audiences, the poet employs techniques of concealment and disclosure to foster an anticanonical public.
In Gender in the Fiction of George Sand, Françoise Massardier-Kenney argues that the major nineteenth-century French writer George Sand articulates in her novels a complex and extremely modern conception of gender, questioning prevalent patriarchal modes of discourse and redefining masculinity and femininity. Through the analysis of a representative sample of Sand's works (Indiana, Jacques, La dernière Aldini, Jeanne, Horace, Valv'dre, Melle la Quintinie, Gabriel, Lucrezia Floriana, and Nanon), Massardier-Kenney uncovers the themes and strategies used by Sand to challenge essentializing and negative representations of women. Gender in the Fiction of George Sand demonstrates the centrality of Sand's pioneering exploration of the construction of gender. This original study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century French literature and culture, women's literature, and gender studies.
This volume draws contributors from around the globe who represent the full range of approaches to scholarship in nineteenth-century French studies: historical, literary, cultural, art historical, philosophical, and comparative. The theme of the volume - Birth and Death - is one with particular resonance for nineteenth-century French studies, since the nineteenth century is commonly perceived as an age of new life and renovation. It is the epoch that witnessed an efflorescence of industrial and artistic progress, the birth of the individual and the birth of the novel, and the creation of an urban population in the major demographic shift from the rural provinces to Paris. At the same time, h...
"By examining literary portraits of the woman as artist, Linda M. Lewis traces the matrilineal inheritance of four Victorian novelists and poets: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. She argues that while the male Romantic artist saw himself as god and hero, the woman of genius lacked a guiding myth until Germaine de Stael and George Sand created one. The protagonists of Stael's Corinne and Sand's Consuelo combine attributes of the goddess Athena, the Virgin Mary, Virgil's Sibyl, and Dante's Beatrice. Lewis illustrates how the resulting Corinne/Consuelo effect is exhibited in scores of English artist-as-heroine narratives, particularly in the works of these four prominent writers who most consciously and elaborately allude to the French literary matriarchs." "Exploring a connection between French and English literature and providing fresh insight, Germaine de Stael, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist makes a major contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century feminism."--Jacket.
The Romantic novelist George Sand - friend of Balzac, Hugo, and Liszt, and lover of Musset and Chopin - wrote this novel in 1834 in Paris and Venice, during her tumultuous affair with Musset. Through this story of a princess, the absolute ruler of an imaginary kingdom, Sand explores issues of leadership by women, male jealousy, and the problems faced by women who want both political power and committed relationships. The Private Secretary (Le Secrétaire intime) speaks to the concerns of contemporary women who want to «have it all», and is appropriate for courses in women's studies as well as French literature in translation.