The writing of letters and the rise of the novel provided a way for some women to express themselves at a time when the all-male French Academy defined the very parameters of French literary acceptability and tradition. Women who were consigned to convents, workhouses or prisons were in most respects deprived of agency, yet many found ways to respond to the legal documents served against them. The letters and associated materials preserved in their legal files provide evidence that these women did not remain quiet, as they found means to resist authority. The forensic storytelling examined in this book supports the conclusion that the documents written in these constrained circumstances have both historical and literary merit and form the core of an understudied genre of literature.
This work brings to bear multiple perspectives in a study of forensic storytelling in 18th century France. Women who were consigned to convents wrote letters to respond to the legal documents served against them. These responses have both historical and literary merit and form the core of an understudied genre.
Recenzijas
This important archival study opens up the rich possibilities of what Abrams' calls "forensic storytelling." This strategy of scholarly engagement is the authors new way into the story of early modern womens writing as a literature of resistance in 18th century France....Abrams brings together the history of 18th century French women and the literature by and about these women. As a French literary scholar of the 18th century, she offers a window into the time period. Through careful and insightful close readings, as well as elegant translations of the handwritten archival texts at the heart of this book, she makes these womens lives accessible to scholars and students alike. Not only does she supply readers with the French and the English translations of key texts from these women's case files, but we also see the text in a robust array of photographs of these very documents.
--Laura Levitt, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender, Temple University, USA
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: Forensic Storytelling and Antimonarchical Epistolarity
Chapter Two: Les Causes Célčbres, Factum or Fiction? Or: Thats What He
Said!
Chapter Three: Tanastčs est Satan: Authenticity and Audacity in the Writings
of Marie-Madeleine Bonafon
Chapter Four:Excess or Success? The Case of Mme Genevičve de Gravelle
Chapter Five: Whats in a Name?: The Case of Angélique Schwab
Conclusion
Index
Barbara Abrams is Professor of French and Womens and Gender Studies and is Chair of the Department of History, Language, and Global Culture at Suffolk University, Boston. Her academic work focuses on French literature of the Enlightenment and Womens and Gender Studies. Her recent publications include several articles on womens epistolary writing in eighteenth-century France, the Factum as Fiction, and a new critical focus on the novels of Marie-Madeleine Bonafon. Her previous books include a multigraph project titled Reframing Rousseaus Le Lévite dEphraļm: The Hebrew Bible, Hospitality, and Modern Identity (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment) and Le Bizarre and Le Décousu in the Novels and Theoretical Works of Denis Diderot: How the Idea of Marginality Originated in Eighteenth-Century France, which examines the background of our modern concept of marginality by focusing on Diderots materialist philosophy.
