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"The purpose of this edition is to bring together for the first time a significant number of critical analyses on Marie-Catherine Desjardins by prominent scholars in a full-length study devoted to the full range of genres. The essays in this volume analyze a reasonable range of the author's works - novels, plays, letters, short stories - and demonstrate an impressive knowledge of the historical contexts - biographical, literary, social, and political - influencing Villedieu. The authors engage in textual analysis informed by relevant scholarship on Desjardins and on other seventeenth-century writers."--Jacket.
This volume offers the first translation into English of two seminal works by the seventeenth-century French woman author, Marie-Catherine Desjardins, better known as Madame de Villedieu. The first of these works, Lettres et billets galants [Love Notes and Letters], was published in 1668 and contains her most intimate letters to her lover, Antoine de Villedieu. The second work, Le Portefeuille [The Letter Case], which appeared in 1674, is an epistolary novel composed of a series of ten letters from the Marquis de Naumanoir to a nobleman in the provprovinces. These letters recount in a delightfully playful manner the amorous misadventures and intrigues of a half-dozen Parisian socialites. This work's close ties in terms of content and form to the publication of Villedieu's Lettres et billets gallants six years earlier make it a perfect complement. The author's introduction offers not only a critical interpretation of these works but stresses the importance of the publication of Desjardins' authentic correspondence as a turning point in her career and key to her later works.
This extensive collection of English-language essays examines the many strategies of resistance to male domination that women in France from the 16th through the 18th centuries utilized in their lives and their writings.
Known as Madame de Villedieu, Marie-Catherine Desjardins (ca. 1640-83) was a prolific writer who played an important role in the evolution of the early modern French novel. One of the earliest women to write for a living, she defied cultural convention by becoming an innovator and appealing to popular tastes through fiction, drama, and poetry. Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, a semi autobiographical novel, portrays an enterprising woman who writes the story of her life, a complex tale that runs counter to social expectations and novelistic conventions. A striking work, the story skillfully mixes real events from the author's life with fictional adventures. At a time when few women published, Villedieu's Memoirs is a significant achievement in creating a voice for the early modern woman writer. Produced while the French novel form was still in its infancy, it should be welcomed by any scholar of women's writing or the early development of the novel.
Rosalia de Castro (1837-85) wrote five volumes of poetry before succumbing to cancer of the uterus at the age of forty-eight. While she is perhaps best known for her more introspective and intimate poetry, Castro's mature works are also highly feminist and political in thematic orientation. This book examines the fascinating system of poetic techniques Castro employs in her works to link the compelling issues surrounding femaleness and identity- both national and individual- to the construction of a system of gendered symbolic language that has been vastly understudied by contemporary scholars.
In critical readings of ten of Moliere's most important plays, this book argues that a rivalry that endangers order by collapsing differences structures the works and provides a key to their understanding. Moliere's great comic characters all want desperately something that they cannot have. The objects of their desire may vary, but the presence of desire itself remains a constant. In L'Ecole des femmes. Amolphe wants, above all, to avoid cuckoldry. The title character in Dom Juan covets women. The bourgeois Monsieur Jourdain does all in his power to become a gentleman in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, and the eponymous character in George Dandin views his woes as the price of an ill-fated marriage that he had hoped would elevate him to noble rank. Le malade imaginaire, Argan, has a seemingly crazy desire to be sick. The list could go on.
Provides reviews of six works by the poet Moliere along with criticism and thematic analysis of other works and a short biography of the poet.
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A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.