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The Legacy of French Women Writers in the English Long Eighteenth Century

The Legacy of French Women Writers in the English Long Eighteenth Century

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Nicole Horejsi)

CFP (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 19-22 March, 2014, Los Angeles):


“The Legacy of French Women Writers in the English Long Eighteenth Century,”

Nicole Horejsi, Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia,

602 Philosophy Hall, 1150 Amsterdam Avenue, NY NY 1002

 

nicole.horejsi@gmail.com

The following panel seeks proposals for papers of approximately 15 minutes in length:

In a recent issue of The Eighteenth Century devoted to “The Future of Feminist Theory in Eighteenth-Century Studies” (Spring 2009), Joan DeJean compares the disciplinary fortunes of English and French literature. For English, just “three short decades the disciplinary fortunes of English and French literature. For English, just “three short decades contain a triumphal story,” so that “English literary history will never again be able to write women out of the story of the long eighteenth century” (21).

Noting the absence of a similar triumphal narrative in French literary history, DeJean poses the titular question, “And What About French Women Writers?” Taking inspiration from DeJean’s observations about the relative states of eighteenth-century English and French literary studies, this seminar seeks to encourage papers on the substantial influence French women writers exerted over the English imagination. How, and to what ends, do eighteenth-century writers and readers appropriate the legacies of their forebears and contemporaries, authors such as Scudéry, Graffigny, Ricobboni, Lafayette, Villedieu, and d’Aulnoy, among others?


Possible avenues for discussion include the continued formal and thematic appeal of the seventeenth-century heroic romance in Restoration and eighteenth-century England (in prose fiction, the heroic drama, etc.); how the heroic romance informed historical fiction and historiographic practices; the historical circumstances that encouraged an admiration for seventeenth-century French women writers; parallels to salon culture; the deployment of genres associated with the salon, such as the oration and conversation; and the relationship between French women writers’ classicism and English neoclassicism.