Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Domna C. Stanton, Distinguished Professor of French at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, is the author of books and essays on early-modern French studies, women’s writing and feminist theory, and the practices of Human Rights. She is past President of the Modern Language Association, former editor of PMLA, and currently serves on a number of non-profit boards.

• Introduction; Part I Women Writ; Chapter 1 Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen: (Un)classical Bodies in Les caquets de l’accouchée (1622)?; Chapter 2 The Daughters’ Sacrifice and the Paternal Order in Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide; Chapter 3 The Female Mind Reformed: Pedagogical Counter-Discourses, Radical and Regressive, Under Louis XIV; Part II Women Writing; Chapter 4 The Heroine at War: Self-Divisions in La Guette’s “Extraordinary” Memoirs; Chapter 5 From the Maternal Metaphor to Metonymy and History: Seventeenth-Century Discourses of Maternity and the Passion of Mme de Sévigné; Chapter 6 Overreading, Without Doubt: Ambiguity and Irony in La Princesse de Montpensier; afterword Afterword;

’... [an] ambitious, illuminating analysis of gender identity in early-modern French literature. ... groundbreaking ... [Stanton's] erudition is impressive, her methodology exemplary. ... this study is destined to become a classic ... Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.’ Choice 'Writing with great elegance and critical depth, Stanton brings together a deep understanding of the literary and cultural history of seventeenth-century France, as well as of gender theory. Readers will benefit for many years to come from Stanton’s knowledge of the highly controversial aspects of women’s history in all its nuances (seen from both the male and female perspectives) and from her readings of the texts she analyzes in which philology becomes a form of rigorous philosophy, illuminating the status of women in early modern society.' Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College, USA