Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Female voices in convents, courts and households: the French Middle Ages
- 2 To choose ink and pen: French Renaissance women's writing
- 3 Altering the fabric of history: women's participation in the classical age
- 4 The eighteenth century: women writing, women learning
- 5 Eighteenth-century women novelists: genre and gender
- 6 The nineteenth century: shaping women
- 7 1900–1969: writing the void
- 8 From order to adventure: women's fiction since 1970
- 9 Changing the script: women writers and the rise of autobiography
- 10 Women poets of the twentieth century
- 11 Voicing the feminine: French women playwrights of the twentieth century
- 12 Feminist literary theory
- Bibliographies
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Female voices in convents, courts and households: the French Middle Ages
- 2 To choose ink and pen: French Renaissance women's writing
- 3 Altering the fabric of history: women's participation in the classical age
- 4 The eighteenth century: women writing, women learning
- 5 Eighteenth-century women novelists: genre and gender
- 6 The nineteenth century: shaping women
- 7 1900–1969: writing the void
- 8 From order to adventure: women's fiction since 1970
- 9 Changing the script: women writers and the rise of autobiography
- 10 Women poets of the twentieth century
- 11 Voicing the feminine: French women playwrights of the twentieth century
- 12 Feminist literary theory
- Bibliographies
- Index
Summary
‘All history is first chronology’, Henri-Jean Martin, the cultural historian, asserts in the opening lines of his Histoire et pouvoirs de l'écrit. A History of Women's Writing in France is true to this definition of history, since it is, first and foremost, a chronological survey, with contributions ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day. As this organization suggests, traditional categories have been retained within this chronology, despite the fact that feminist historiography has called into question the very notion of ‘periodization’, implying as it does a common history for both sexes. Such categories, one could argue, can and should be retained in a volume devoted exclusively to women's writing, not least because, both implicitly and explicitly, this History is relational and seeks to reinstate women's distinctive contribution to those periods, even as it excludes the men who history records as shaping them.
Histories such as this one are necessarily selective and exclusive. First, and most obviously, there is the exclusion of male writers, important figures canonized by other sorts of literary history and criticism. This particular exclusion needs no excuses, but it does make this account of writing in France a partial one, in both senses of the word. Only when women's part in the shaping of literary history is fully restored, only when their activities and works are fully re-integrated in the chronology of both history and writing, will it be possible to address this first kind of exclusivism.
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- A History of Women's Writing in France , pp. 1 - 9Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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