Models of Women in Sixteenth-Century French Literature

Pollie BROMILOW, Models of Women in Sixteenth-Century French Literature : Female Exemplarity in the Histoires tragiques (1559) and the Heptaméron (1559), Ceredigion (Royaume-Uni), Mellen Press, 2007, 224 p.
ISBN10 0-7734-5332-6  
ISBN13 978-0-7734-5332-6


RÉSUMÉ

This book offers a feminist critique of the so-called “crisis of exemplarity” in late Renaissance texts by comparing and contrasting examples proposed to female readers in two collections of sixteenth-century French short stories, Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires tragiques and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. The author proposes that female exemplarity has its own poetics and cannot be considered simply as identical or symmetrical to male exemplarity. What emerges in the course of the study is an understanding of the different ways in which exemplarity enters the life of the female reader: through history, truth, invention, memory and strangeness. 


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Foreword by Jennifer J. Britnell
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Histoires tragiques and the Heptaméron: Initial Points of Comparison
1 Female Exemplarity in the Histoires tragiques
2 Female Exemplarity in the Heptaméron
3 ‘Mon histoire est si belle et sy veritable’: Vérité, Histoire, Invention and Female Exemplarity
4 Mémoire/Memoria: Women Remembering and Remembering Women
5 ‘Dieu que c’est un estrange animal que la femme’: ‘Strangeness’ and Female
Conclusion
Bibliography before 1800
General Bibliography
Index nominum


À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR

Dr. Pollie Bromilow is currently Lecturer in French in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Liverpool. She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of French at King’s College, Cambridge.