Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, revised edition

The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France

Anne E. Duggan

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781644532164
  9781644532157
• eBook ISBN:
  9781644532171
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The original edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, published in 2005, was a pathbreaking work of early modern literary history, exploring women's role in the rise of the fairy tale and their use of this new genre to carve out roles as major contributors to the literature of their time. This new edition, with a new introduction and a forward by acclaimed scholar Allison Stedman, emphasizes the scholarly legacy of Anne Duggan's original work, and its continuing field-changing implications. The book studies the works of two of the most prolific seventeenth-century women writers, Madeleine de Scudéry and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. Analyzing their use of the novel, the chronicle, and the fairy tale, Duggan examines how Scudéry and d'Aulnoy responded to and participated in the changes of their society, but from different generational and ideological positions. This study also takes into account the history of the salon, an unofficial institution that served as a locus for elite women's participation in the cultural and literary production of their society. In order to highlight the debates that emerged with the increased participation of aristocratic women within the public sphere, the book also explores the responses of two academicians, Nicolas Boileau and Charles Perrault.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction to the Second Revised Edition
• Preface
• 1. Politics, Gender, and Cultural Change
• 2. Love Orders Chaos: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie, Histoire Romaine
• 3. Adults at Play: Les Chroniques des Samedis de Mademoiselle de Scudéry
• 4. Boileau and Perrault: The Public Sphere and Female Folly
• 5. The Tyranny of Patriarchs in L’Histoire d’Hypolite, Comte de Duglas
• 6. Fairy Tales and Mondanité
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index