The market for commercial beauty products exploded in Third Republic France, with a proliferation of goods promising to erase female imperfections and perpetuate an aesthetic of femininity that conveyed health and respectability. While the industry's meteoric growth helped to codify conventional standards of womanhood, The Force of Beauty goes beyond the narrative of beauty culture as a tool for sociopolitical subjugation to show how it also targeted women as important consumers in major markets and created new avenues by which they could express their identities and challenge or reinforce gender norms. As cosmetics companies and cultural media, from magazines to novels to cinema, urged women to aspire to commercial standards of female perfection, beauty evolved as a goal to be pursued rather than a biological inheritance. The products and techniques that enabled women to embody society's feminine ideal also taught them how to fashion their bodies into objects of desire and thus offered a subversive tool of self-expression. Holly Grout explores attempts by commercial beauty culture to reconcile a standard of respectability with female sexuality, as well as its efforts to position French women within the global phenomenon of changing views on modern womanhood. Grout draws on a wide range of primary sources-hygiene manuals, professional and legal debates about the right to fabricate and distribute "medicines," advertisements for beauty products, and contemporary fiction and works of art-to explore how French women navigated changing views on femininity. Her seamless integration of gender studies with business history, aesthetics, and the history of medicine results in a textured and complex study of the relationship between the politics of womanhood and the politics of beauty.

In this panoramic study, Freeman Henry chronicles the rise to prominence of French language and culture. He meticulously analyzes the protracted government-sponsored efforts to foster and maintain that status and--ultimately--the latter-day challenges to France's national linguistic identity posed by Anglocentric globalization and a multicentric European Union. The internal history of the language is closely intertwined with its external history: phonology, morphology, lexicography, and orthography come alive against a backdrop of political, cultural, and institutional manifestations. A felicitous blend of documentary evidence and critical analysis serves to elucidate crucial stages, events, and concepts: 16th-century exuberance, 17th-century foundations, 18th-century expansionism, Revolutionary ideology. Restoration restructuring and commercialization, the advent of linguistic science, the coming of the media age, encroaching technocracy, and clamors for linguistic parity. Individual chapter focus on the plight of minority linguistic communities such as the blind and the deaf, language monitoring policies and legislation such as the Loi Toubon, as well as the feminization project legitimizing Madame la ministre. --Publisher description.

Provides the listing of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. This is a reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. It contains nearly 8,800 entries.

Mothers and daughters -- the female figures neglected by classic psychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrative -- are at the center of this book. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the Western European and North American traditions reveal that the story of motherhood remains the unspeakable plot of Western culture. Focusing on the feminine and, more controversially, on the maternal, this book alters our perception of both the familial structures basic to traditional narrative -- the Oedipus story -- and the narrative structures basic to traditional representations of the family -- Freud's family romance. Confronting psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation with narrative theories, Marianne Hirsch traces the emergence and transformation of female family romance patterns from Jane Austen to Marguerite Duras.

Meeting a man in Vegas is easy. Finding one to settle down with? Not so much. When I relocated to Sin City for my job, I decided this was my fresh start to get away from old habits, including my penchant for dating the wrong type of guy. Namely, bad boys. So, I came up with an experiment to make me expand my dating horizons. I can only talk to men whose name begins with a certain letter of the alphabet. After I meet them, we hang out, and we might date for a short period of time, but if he’s not the one I move on to the next letter. It’s easy, and it leads me to meeting all kinds of new men until one night at the bar, a very sexy bartender discovers my little plan. The cocky bastard of a bartender is Nicolás Antonio Santiago, and he’s as gorgeous as his name. Enthusiastic, charming, and clever, Nic takes to my love life with interest and helps me with my pursuits. We become fast friends, and he whisks me on his wild adventures. His impulsive ways become addictive, and while I’ve been trying to stay away from bad boys, I find myself falling for one. As our relationship grows intense, I have to push my desires aside and stay the course. Nic doesn’t do love or relationships. Even if the sexual tension between us is palpable, I have an experiment to finish, and the next letter in my list is far from N. They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. My fear is when I leave, my heart will stay here too.