Rachilde

Prosecuted for obscenity in her novel Monsieur Venus, Marguerite Eymery (pen name Rachilde), an apparently genteel young woman from a provincial bourgeois family, burst onto the French literary scene in 1884 amid scandal. This story of a sadistic transvestite and her pretty male lover was the first in a long series of novels, plays and stories dealing often in the most macabre and sensationalistic terms with sadism, gender inversion, and sexual desire.At the heart of the French literary world, Rachilde's life and writing defied patriarchal rules, particularly in relation to female sexuality, but she consistently and vehemently rejected feminism. Her extraordinary life and work, including a vast output as a literary reviewer, offer a prism through which to view the vibrant social and cultural history of France from the belle époque to the Second World War. This book is the first serious critical study of Rachilde's work. Exploring the interwoven themes of French naturalism, modernism, decadence and feminism, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in French culture, literature and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century.

Combining psychoanalytic criticism, feminist theory, and literary analysis, Maternal Fictions offers a complex psychological portrait of these writers who managed at once to challenge patriarchal authority and at the same time attempt to return to the maternal.

Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. She traces the phenomenon from Balzac, who introduced it to canonical literature, through Flaubert, Zola, Rachilde and Lorrain, to Proust. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

Modern Drama by Women 1880s-1930s offers the first direct evidence that women playwrights helped create the movement known as Modern Drama.It contains twelve plays by women from the Americas, Europe and Asia, spanning a national and stylistic range from Swedish realism to Russian symbolism. Six of these plays are appearing in their first English-language translation.Playwrights include:* Anne-Charlotte Leffler Edgren (Sweden)* Amelia Pincherle Rosselli (Italy)* Elsa Bernstein (Germany)* Elizabeth Robins (Britain)* Marie Leneru (France)* Alfonsia Storni (Argentina)* Hella Wuolijoki (Finland)* Hasegawa Shigure (Japan)* Rachilde (France)* Zinaida Gippius (Russia)* Djuna Barnes (USA)* Marita Bonner (USA)This groundbreaking anthology explodes the traditional canon. In these plays, the New Woman represents herself and her crises in all of the styles and genres available to the modern dramatist. Unprecedented in diversity and scope, it is a collection which no scholar, student or lover of modern drama can afford to miss.

Fifty-one essays cover the lives and works of the most important women writers in the history of French literature with an emphasis on their experiences as writers, a discussion of their major themes, and brief surveys of critical reactions. Each essay is followed by a bibliography of primary works, a list of titles translated into English, and a selection of critical studies. An additional essay describes the trobairitz, the women troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries. The volume ends with a chronology featuring the dates of events and trends of special significance to French women.