Subverting The Family Romance

"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

In the 1990s, a boom in autobiographical novels and memoirs about incest emerged, making incest one of the hottest topics to connect daytime TV talk shows, the self-help industry, and the literary publishing circuit. In Everybody's Family Romance, Gillian Harkins places this proliferation of incest literature at the center of transformations in the political and economic climate of the late twentieth century. Harkins's interdisciplinary approach reveals how women's narratives about incest were co-opted by-and yet retained resistant strains against-the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. Across chapters examining legal cases on recovered memory, popular journalism, and novels and memoirs by Dorothy Allison, Carolivia Herron, Kathryn Harrison, and Sapphire, Harkins demonstrates that incest narratives look backward into the past. In these accounts, images of incest forge links between U.S. chattel slavery and the distributive impasses of the welfare state and between decades-distant childhoods and emergent memories of the present. In contrast to recent claims that incest narratives eclipse broader frameworks of political and economic power, Harkins argues that their emergence exposes changing structural relations between the family and the nation and, in doing so, transforms the analyses of American familial sexual violence.

"In a cultural shift around the mid-point of the French eighteenth century, the mode of wit is increasingly displaced by bourgeois pathos. Social sophistication and sexual experience are rejected in favour of a retreat into ideal imagination. Instead of the novel of worldliness, we encounter fictions of better worlds: original, natural, familial, innocent and harmonious, protected against reality and time. The regressive shift is traced in this study in general terms, and then through detailed analysis of three of the best-selling novels of the period. The turning-point is represented by Mme de Graffignys Lettres dune Peruvienne (1747, 1752) with its profound ambivalence towards knowledge. A new order is revealed and set out, but still declared lacking, in Rousseaus Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761). The visionary return to the organic wholeness of nature is offered by Bernardins Paul et Virginie (1788)."

Chronicles the emergence of an idealized mother figure whose reforming zeal sought to make French society more just. This book contends that this attempt during the eighteenth century to rewrite social relations in terms of greater social equality represents an important but overlooked strand of Enlightenment thought.

Ilya Vinitsky's Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia is the first major study in English of Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852)—a poet, translator of German romantic verse, and, crucially, mentor of Pushkin. It focuses overdue attention to an important figure in Russian literary and cultural history. Vinitsky’s "psychological biography" argues that Zhukovsky very consciously set out to create for himself an emotional life that reflected his unique brand of romanticism, different from what we associate with Pushkin or poets such as Byron or Wordsworth. For Zhukovsky, ideal love was harmonious, built on a mystical foundation of spiritual kinship. Vinitsky shows how Zhukovksy played a pivotal role in the evolution of ideas central to Russia’s literary and cultural identity from the end of the eighteenth century into the decades following the Napoleonic Wars.

"... innovative and important thinking about the various relations between feminist theory, queer theory, and lesbian theory, as well as the possibility that liberation can be mutual rather than mutually exclusive." -- Lambda Book Report "Challenging and interesting." -- Just Out A collection of fifteen interdisciplinary essays examining the history, current condition, and evolving shape of lesbian alliances with U.S. feminists. Contributors explore the social and aesthetic significance of the terms "lesbian" and "feminist" with the interest of reforming and strengthening them.

'It has taken me a long time, my dearest Aza, to fathom the cause of that contempt in which women are held in this country ...' Zilia, an Inca Virgin of the Sun, is captured by the Spanish conquistadores and brutally separated from her lover, Aza. She is rescued and taken to France by Déterville, a nobleman, who is soon captivated by her. One of the most popular novels of the eighteenth century, the Letters of a Peruvian Woman recounts Zilia's feelings on her separation from both her lover and her culture, and her experience of a new and alien society. Françoise de Graffigny's bold and innovative novel clearly appealed to the contemporary taste for the exotic and the timeless appetite for love stories. But by fusing sentimental fiction and social commentary, she also created a new kind of heroine, defined by her intellect as much as her feelings. The novel's controversial ending calls into question traditional assumptions about the role of women both in fiction and society, and about what constitutes 'civilization'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This edited volume presents new and original approaches to teaching the French foreign-language curriculum, reconceptualizing the French classroom through a more inclusive lens. The volume engages with a broad range of scholars to facilitate an understanding of the process of French (de)colonization as well as its reverberations into the postcolonial era, and a deeper engagement with the global interconnectedness of these processes. Chapters in Part I revist the concept of the "francophonie," decenter the field from “metropolitan” or “hexagonal” and white France and underline how current teaching materials reproduce epistemic and colonial violence. Part II adopts an intersectional approach to address topics of gender inclusivity, trans-affirming teaching, queer materials, and ableism. Finally, Part III presents new ways to transform the discipline by affirming our commitment to social justice and making sure that our classrooms are representative of our students’ enriching diversity.