"This study will particularly appeal to scholars of gender studies, but will also interest eighteenth-century specialists, reader-response critics, and any critic interested in the epistolary genre. Dr. McAlpin compares the evidence of de La Tour's authorial consciousness with that of far better known letter writers, both women (Sevigne, Graffigny, Lespinasse, Roland, Suzanne Necker) and men (Boswell, in particular). The book also introduces the exchange of letters to the English-speaking community of eighteenth-century scholars. While the de La Tour-Rousseau exchange was republished in French in 1998, it is not yet available in English. This book provides translations of the first, most significant letters in its appendix."--BOOK JACKET.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

Writing the Revolution challenges the thesis that exclusion defined women's experiences of the French Revolution by exploring the life of a middle-class wife and mother of revolutionary elites, Rosalie Jullien.

This collection of essays was assembled to honor the memory of the late, eminent Voltaire scholar J. Patrick Lee. It includes seventeen essays by prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France on a variety of topics in French eighteenth-century studies. Essay titles include: â oeA New Genre: lâ (TM)OpÃ(c)ra moral / Moral Opera in Eighteenth-Century France, â â oeVoltaire and the Uses of Censorship: The Example of the Lettres Philosophiques, â â oeEnlightenment Intertextuality: The Case of Heraldry in the EncyclopÃ(c)die mÃ(c)thodique, â â oeSex as Satire in Voltaire's Fiction, â â oeViolence, Levity, and the Dictionary in Old Regime France: Chaudonâ (TM)s Dictionnaire anti-philosophique, â â oeLâ (TM)abbÃ(c), lâ (TM)amazone, le bon roi et les frelons, â â oeGreuzeâ (TM)s Self-Portraits: Figures of Artistic Identity, â â oeFrom Forest to Field: Sylvan Elegists of Eighteenth-Century France, â â oeThe Falsification of Voltaire's Letters and the Public Persona of the Author: From the Lettres secrettes (1765) to the Commentaire historique (1776), â â oeThe Baron de Saint-Castin, Bricaire de la Dixmerie, and Azakia (1765), â â oeJohn Law and the Rhetoric of Calculation, â â oeâ ~Le Roi des Bulgaresâ (TM) Was Voltaire's Satire on Frederick the Great just too Opaque?â â oeVoltaire and the Voyage to Rome, â â oeTextual liaisons: Voltaire, PamÃ(c)la and Don Quixote, â â oeLes petits livres du grand homme: polÃ(c)mique et combat philosophique chez Voltaire, â â oeSentimental Horror: Enlightenment Tragedy and the Rise of the Genre Terrible, â â oeVoltaire and the Comic Genre: Polemics and Rhetoric.â

Focusing on eighteenth-century constructions of symbolic femininity and eighteenth-century women's writing in relation to contemporary utopian discourse, this volume adjusts our understanding of the utopia of the Enlightenment, placing a unique emphasis on colonial utopias. These essays reflect on issues related to specific configurations of utopias and utopianism by considering in detail English and French texts by both women (Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Isabelle de Charrière) and men (Paltock and Montesquieu). The contributors ask the following questions: In the influential discourses of eighteenth-century utopian writing, is there a place for 'woman,' and if so, what (or where) is it? How do 'women' disrupt, confirm, or ground the utopian projects within which these constructs occur? By posing questions about the inscription of gender in the context of eighteenth-century utopian writing, the contributors shed new light on the eighteenth-century legacies that continue to shape contemporary views of social and political progress.