Author: Barbara K. AltmannPublisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415939096
Category : Authors, French
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
Table of contents
Christine de Pizan
Author: Barbara K. AltmannPublisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415939096
Category : Authors, French
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
Table of contents
Queering the Middle Ages
Author: Glenn BurgerPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816634040
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
The essays in this volume present new work that, in one way or another, "queers" stabilized conceptions of the Middle Ages, allowing us to see the period and its systems of sexuality in radically different, off-center, and revealing ways. While not denying the force of gender and sexual norms, the authors consider how historical work has written out or over what might have been non-normative in medieval sex and culture, and they work to restore a sense of such instabilities. At the same time, they ask how this pursuit might allow us not only to re-envision medieval studies but also to rethink how we study culture from our current set of vantage points within postmodernity. The authors focus on particular medieval moments: Christine de Pizan's representation of female sexuality; chastity in the Grail romances; the illustration of "the sodomite" in manuscript commentaries on Dante's Commedia; the complex ways that sexuality inflected English national politics at the time of Edward II's deposition; the construction of the sodomitic Moor by Reconquista Spain. Throughout, their work seeks to disturb a logic that sees the past as significant only insofar as it may make sense for and of a stabilized present.
Proust's Cup of Tea
Author: Emily EellsPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351908057
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Proust's Cup of Tea analyzes Proust's reading of various Victorian authors and shows how they contributed to A la recherche du temps perdu. This book proves that British literature and art played a fundamental role in Proust's writing process by citing from the manuscript versions of his novel, as well as from his correspondence, essays and the lengthy critical appartus accompanying his translations of Ruskin. Eells reflects here on why Proust was attracted to Victorian culture, and how he incorporated it into his novel. The works of the British novelists he was most interested in-Thomas Hardy and George Eliot-address questions of gender which Proust develops in his own work. He builds Sodome et Gomorrhe I, the section of his novel focusing on homosexuality, on a series of explicit citations and guarded allusions to Shakespeare, Darwin Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson. Eells explores how Proust followed in the pioneering footsteps of those British writers who had ventured beyond the boundaries of conventional sexuality, though he took pains to erase their traces in the definitive version of his work. This study also highlights how Proust made his fictitious painter Elstir into a master of ambiguity, by modeling his art on Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler. Eells shows that Proust drew on Victorian culture in his depiction of sexual ambiguity, arguing that he confounded eroticism and aestheticism in the way he inextricably linked the man-woman figure with British art and literature. As Proust aestheticized male and female homosexuality using references to British art and letters, Eells coins the term 'Anglosexuality' to refer to his characters of the third sex. She defines Anglosexuality as an intersexuality represented through intertextuality, as an artistic sensitivity, an aesthetic stance, and a new way of seeing. Proust's Cup of Tea thus demonstrates that Victorian culture and homoeroticism form one of the cornerstones of Proust's monumental work.
Posthumous America
Author: Benjamin HoffmannPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271081821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784); the “uchronotopia”—the imaginary perfect society set in America and based on what France might have become without the Revolution—of Lezay-Marnésia’s Lettres écrites des rives de l’Ohio (1792); and the political and nationalistic motivations behind François-René Chateaubriand’s idealization of America in Voyage en Amérique (1827) and Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1850), Hoffmann shows how the authors’ liberties with the truth helped create the idealized and nostalgic representation of America that dominated the collective European consciousness of their times. From a historical perspective, Posthumous America works to determine when exactly these writers stopped transcribing what they actually observed in America and started giving imaginary accounts of their experiences. A vital contribution to transatlantic studies, this detailed exploration of French perspectives on the colonial era, the War of Independence, and the birth of the American Republic sheds new light on the French fascination with America. Posthumous America will be invaluable for historians, political scientists, and specialists of literature whose scholarship looks at America through European eyes.
Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century
Author: Jennifer BritnellPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351763792
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
This title was first published in 2000: The printed writings of the most important authors of the sixteenth century are characterised by frequent references to current affairs. This collection brings together essays by literary scholars and historians of the era to discuss various ways in which those writing in the vernacular during the early sixteenth century responded to contemporary events. The papers in this volume also demonstrate how the spread of literacy was of fundamental significance for the economics of book production, and for ways in which political power was exercised and expressed, as well as for the development of new literary forms of critical and occasional writing.
Humour and Humanism in the Renaissance
Author: Barbara C. BowenPublisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000948412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
Of the articles in this volume, eight concern a world-famous author (François Rabelais); the others are studies of little-known authors (Cortesi, Corrozet, Mercier) or genres (the joke, the apophthegm). The common theme, in all but one, is humour: how it was defined, and how used, by orators and humanists but also by court jesters, princes, peasants and housewives. Though neglected by historians, this subject was of crucial importance to writers as different as Luther, Erasmus, Thomas More and François Rabelais. The book is divided into four sections. 'Humanist Wit' concerns the large and multi-lingual corpus of Renaissance facetiae. The second and third parts focus on French humanist humour, Rabelais in particular, while the last section is titled '"Serious" Humanists' because humour is by no means absent from it. For the Renaissance, as Erasmus and Rabelais amply demonstrate, and as the 'minor' authors studied here confirm, wit, whether affectionate or bitingly satirical, can coexist with, and indeed be inseparable from, serious purpose. Rabelais, as so often, said it best: 'Rire est le propre de l'homme.'
Technique and Technology
Author: Adrian ArmstrongPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198159896
Category : Early printed books
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
Literary studies cannot neglect the study of books, the physical objects through which literary texts are transmitted. Book form is especially relevant to the literature of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which saw the crucial shift from manuscript to print in Western Europe.This book examines manuscripts and printed editions of three major French writers of this key period: Jean Molinet, Jean Lemaire de Belges and Jean Bouchet. Presentational features which influence the reading of poems, such as layout, illustration, anthologization and paratext, are analysed. Thedevelopment of these features reflects a gradual change in the ways in which literary self-consciousness is manifested. In earlier texts, produced within an essentially manuscript culture, poets' creative investment in their work is exhibited primarily as formal virtuosity. As printing becomesdominant, such virtuosity tends to be rejected in favour of self-commentary and an apparently more personal discourse.
Christine's Vision
Author: Christine de PizanPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429656688
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Originally published in 1993, this book offers a translation of Christine de Pizan's Christine's Vision, as translated by Glenda K. McLeod. One of France's first professionl writers, Christine de Pizan wrote a large and remarkable body of work, distinguished not only for its variety and quality but also for its unusual blend of introspective and public commentary. As Christine's Vision makes clear, Christine sensed the similarities between her fate and France's and felt a close bond with her adopted land.
Humanistica Lovaniensia
Author: Gilbert TournoyPublisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9789061861553
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 484
Book Description
Volume 32
The French Descent into Renaissance Italy, 1494–95
Author: David AbulafiaPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351889338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516
Book Description
The French invasion of Italy under Charles VIII in 1494-95 has long been seen as inaugurating a new and wretched era in Italian history. The present volume, the work of an international team of contributors, seeks to question that assumption by focusing anew on the intricate politics of Renaissance Italy and the long history of Angevin attempts to impose their rule in southern Italy. It was later invasions, it is argued, that did most to reshape the politics of the Italian peninsula. These studies also look at social and economic effects of the French invasion, as well as its cultural aspects, not least the impact of Renaissance culture in France itself. Combining survey papers and research articles, this volume presents a new introduction to the history of late 15th-century Italy. The appendix, listing the Ilardi collection of microfilms, will also provide an invaluable guide to the diplomatic history of the era.