Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers
- Editor: Faith E. Beasley
- Pages: xii & 379 pp.
- Published: 2011
- ISBN: 9781603290968 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603290951 (Hardcover)
“The introduction and the thirty-two chapters are short, carefully focussed and, without exception, a pleasure to read. The book can be consulted quickly for ideas on authors or themes . . . or enjoyed at a more leisurely pace while planning or revising a course.”
—Sixteenth Century Journal
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France has been celebrated as the period of conversation. Salons flourished and became an important social force. Women and men worked together, in dialogue with their contemporaries, other texts, and their culture to create novels, political satire, drama, poetry, fairy tales, travel narratives, and philosophy. Yet the inclusion of women’s contributions, only recently recovered, changes the way we conceive of the period that constitutes one of the building blocks of French national identity and Western civilization, and teachers are often unsure how and where to incorporate the texts into their courses. Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers attempts to reconstruct these conversations by integrating women’s work into classrooms across the curriculum.
The works of French women writers are crucial to courses on the early modern period and enliven many others—whether on literature, history, women’s history, the history of science, philosophy, women’s and gender studies, or European civilization. The essays included in part 1 provide necessary background and help instructors identify places in their courses that could be enriched by taking women’s participation into account. Contributors in part 2 focus on some of the central writers and genres of the period, including Lafayette, Charrière, and Graffigny, the epistolary novel, convent writing, and memoirs. The essays in part 3 offer concrete descriptions of courses that place women’s texts in dialogue with those of their male colleagues or with historical issues.
Lisa Beckstrand
Mary Ellen Birkett
Thomas M. Carr, Jr.
Juliette Cherbuliez
Suzan van Dijk
Perry Gethner
Elizabeth C. Goldsmith
Claire Goldstein
Henriette Goldwyn
Richard E. Goodkin
David Harrison
Chloé Hogg
Louise K. Horowitz
Katharine Ann Jensen
Donna Kuizenga
Roxanne Decker Lalande
Ann Leone
John D. Lyons
Laure Marcellesi
Francis Mathieu
Katherine Montwieler
Nicholas Paige
Volker Schröder
Allison Stedman
Deborah Steinberger
Harriet Stone
Mary Trouille
Holly Tucker
Gabrielle Verdier
Caroline Weber
Kathleen Wine
Abby Zanger
Acknowledgments (xi)
Introduction: Reviving the Conversation (1)
Part I: Cultural and Literary Contexts
The Complexities of the French Classical Lexicon (17)
Woman and Iconography: Early Modern Women and Their Images (25)
Books and Bodies: Early Modern Women in Medical Contexts (39)
Gardens of Change: The Landscapes of Early Modern Women Writers (48)
Textual Production and the Woman Writer (56)
Salons and Innovation (64)
Letters and the Epistolary Novel (76)
Women and the Theatrical Tradition (84)
Daughters as Maternal Masterpieces: Teaching Mother-Daughter Relations in Lafayette and Vigée Lebrun (92)
Jean Racine, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier de Villandon, and Charles Perrault: A Revised Triumvirate (101)
Ways of Knowing: Fontenelle and Gender (109)
Memoirs and the Myths of History: The Case of Marie-Antoinette (119)
Giving Voice to Women’s Experience: Marital Discord and Wife Abuse in Eighteenth-Century French Literature and Society (126)
Convent Writing in Eighteenth-Century France (145)
Female Variations on the Novel as Appreciated by Male Readers: Graffigny, Riccoboni, Charrière (154)
Part II: Teaching Specific Texts
Teaching Scudéry’s Clélie: The Art of Romance (169)
The Marquise de Sévigné: Philosophe (178)
Cartesian Lafayette: Clear and Distinct in La Princesse de Clèves (188)
Remembrance of Wars Past: Lafayette’s Historical Hindsight (202)
Mme d’Aulnoy as Historian and Travel Writer (212)
Mme Du Noyer’s Mémoires: The Politics of Religion in the Ancien Régime (222)
Mme de Villedieu and the Cornelian Paradigm: Problems of Gender and Genre in Le Favori (231)
Verse and Versatility: The Poetry of Antoinette Deshoulières (242)
Villedieu and Manley: Teaching Early Modern Pseudo-Autobiographies (250)
Zoom Zoom: Focusing in on La Princesse de Clèves and Lettres d’une Péruvienne (258)
Tahitian Voices: Mme de Monbart, Rousseau, and Diderot (269)
The Revolutionary Ideas of Olympe de Gouges (280)
Part III: Teaching Specific Courses
Early Modern Women and the Philosophical Tradition (293)
The Politics of Politesse (303)
Women and Men Writing about Love: An Approach to Teaching Seventeenth-Century Literature (310)
Early Modern Women Writers in a History of Ideas Survey Course (317)
French Women Writers in a World Literature Survey (326)
Notes on Contributors (333)
Works Cited (339)
Index (371)
“This collection of essays provides a wealth of information on how to teach women authors in a variety of courses. The usefulness and the fascinating content of this book realize the true potential of the Options for Teaching series.”
—Roland Racevskis, University of Iowa
“[A] must-read for faculty already teaching or thinking of teaching a course on or including early modern French women writers.”
—H-France Review
