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At the same time that secular and religious authorities suppressed women's efforts to read, conduct books written specifically for girls and young unmarried women emerged as a new genre. Nadine Berenguier offers an in-depth analysis of this development in eighteenth-century France, situating conduct books in the context of Enlightenment concerns about improving education in order to reform society. Her study contributes to our understanding of how print culture in eighteenth-century France gave shape to a specific social subset of new readers: modern girls.
"Drawing on Habermas and Freud as well as historians of the family, Daniels takes up the case of three women novelists each writing at a key moment in the parallel development of the novel genre and the modern family. She demonstrates that these writers - confronted with ever more reified exclusion from public life, and relegated to narrowly defined domestic roles - intervened in and subverted the process in their novels. Daniels shows that women writers used the novel first to imagine different social rules that might define alternative kinship systems (Graffigny), and later to find - and create - loopholes within a firmly entrenched system of official and unofficial law (Charriere and Sand)." "Spanning a crucial period in the emergence of modernity, this interdisciplinary study addresses problems in French literary and social history, gender studies, and the history of mentalites."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
During the eighteenth-century, at a time when secular and religious authors in France were questioning women’s efforts to read, a new literary genre emerged: conduct books written specifically for girls and unmarried young women. In this carefully researched and thoughtfully argued book, Professor Nadine Bérenguier shares an in-depth analysis of this development, relating the objectives and ideals of these books to the contemporaneous Enlightenment concerns about improving education in order to reform society. Works by Anne-Thérèse de Lambert, Madeleine de Puisieux, Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Louise d'Epinay, Barthélémy Graillard de Graville, Chevalier de Cerfvol, abbé Joseph...
A sweeping exploration of revolutionary ideas that traveled the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century Nation-based histories cannot do justice to the rowdy, radical interchange of ideas around the Atlantic world during the tumultuous years from 1776 to 1804. National borders were powerless to restrict the flow of enticing new visions of human rights and universal freedom. This expansive history explores how the revolutionary ideas that spurred the American and French revolutions reverberated far and wide, connecting European, North American, African, and Caribbean peoples more closely than ever before. Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notio...
This book radically revises our understanding of the construction of symbolic power in the age of absolutism by examining the fictions that emerge from visual, narrative, and ceremonial representations of (and reactions to) the 1660 marriage of Louis XIV to the Spanish infanta. Drawing on semiotics, the history of theater and spectacle, gender studies, and anthropology, the author reconsiders the nature of representation in absolutist political culture. The book is not intended as a history of the marriage. Rather, the author analyzes in detail exemplary moments or scenes from the royal wedding, in particular uncovering the dialectic at the heart of nuptial fictions. Like the kinship exchang...
Thompson presents a re-appraisal of the 'scandalous memoirists' Costantia Phillips and Laetitia Pilkington, who feature with a cast of other 18th century apologists, and overturns scholarship's traditional discrediting of them.
"Best-selling court cases in eighteenth-century France provide ample evidence of a certain emancipation of women. Certain in the sense of tentative, qualified: women won their cases in surprising numbers yet were represented by their lawyers via limiting stereotypes. Certain also in the sense of sure: lawyers and editors contributed to a liberatory moment, particularly in the two decades leading up to the radical phase of the French Revolution, in which late eighteenth-century constructions of female citizenship offered virtuous women, regardless of rank or even race, "strategic possibilities" for establishing modern identities - defined as self-creating, autonomous, and capable of moral jud...
The writing of letters and the rise of the novel provided a way for some women to express themselves at a time when the all-male French Academy defined the very parameters of French literary acceptability and tradition. Women who were consigned to convents, workhouses or prisons were in most respects deprived of agency, yet many found ways to respond to the legal documents served against them. The letters and associated materials preserved in their legal files provide evidence that these women did not remain quiet, as they found means to resist authority. The forensic storytelling examined in this book supports the conclusion that the documents written in these constrained circumstances have both historical and literary merit and form the core of an understudied genre of literature.
In Career Stories, Juliette Rogers considers a body of largely unexamined novels from the Belle &Époque that defy the usual categories allowed the female protagonist of the period. While most literary studies of the Belle &Époque (1880&–1914) focus on the conventional housewife or harlot distinction for female protagonists, the heroines investigated in Career Stories are professional lawyers, doctors, teachers, writers, archeologists, and scientists. In addition to the one well-known woman writer from the Belle &Époque, Colette, this study will expand our knowledge of relatively unknown authors, including Gabrielle Reval, Marcelle Tinayre, and Colette Yver, who actively participated in ...