Cherchez la femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World
Editor: Erika Fülöp and Adrienne Angelo
Date Of Publication: Jun 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2933-5
Isbn: 1-4438-2933-1
Throughout history, the most fundamental values at the basis of societal organization and culture were determined and sanctified almost exclusively by men—including the values traditionally associated with women, such as corporeal beauty, purity, motherhood, or empathy. However, from ancient times, and increasingly toward the end of the second millennium, women have succeeded in finding ways to overcome such limits and have made their contributions to the revision of values and to the establishment of new ones.

Cherchez la femme offers a selection of essays inquiring into the nature of aesthetic, linguistic, cultural, and social values created, informed, or reformed by women in the French-speaking world, as well as studies on how the discourse of (male) power used female figures to strengthen its own position. With topics ranging in time from Semiramis’s ancient legend to today, and in space from Québec to Haiti, metropolitan France, and New Caledonia, the volume shares the richness and fruitfulness of the female perspective in art, culture, theory, and political action.

Erika Fülöp, PhD, is a freelance translator and literary critic. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary self-reflexive fiction and cultural theory. She has published articles on Proust and a number of contemporary novelists. Her monograph Proust, the One, and the Many is forthcoming with Legenda.

Adrienne Angelo, PhD, Assistant Professor of French at Auburn University, USA, specializes in contemporary women’s writing in France and the Francophone world. Her publications include The Fourth Generation of French Feminist Writers (1985–2010) (Edwin Mellen, 2009) and articles on French filmmakers Catherine Breillat and François Ozon and writers Catherine Millet and Nina Bouraoui.

“Cherchez la femme . . . [makes] a considerable contribution to feminist literary and cultural studies of France and the French-speaking world. . . . What emerges from the volume is an impressively diverse and historicised understanding of women’s challenges to the accepted views of gender, value and behaviour that have confronted them.”

—Margaret Atack, Professor of French, University of Leeds, UK

“The book’s strength lies in the way that each of these tightly focused, lucidly argued case studies of women and values opens out onto broader questions . . . whilst providing a wealth of valuable critical work on . . . contemporary French women writers, postcolonial feminism, and significant women writers and fictional figures. . . . From a set of essays so wide-ranging in both theme and period, the editors have performed the valuable task of constructing a coherent, consistently illuminating totality.”

—Diana Holmes, Professor of French, University of Leeds, UK

“This polyphonic book describes with acute care the various values women embrace in the third wave of feminism in France and in the francophone world. . . . [It] fosters a multifaceted approach to today’s complex state of francophone women’s reconfiguration of the political spaces . . . from which they speak. A welcome set of essays, at once provocative and bearing witness to loss, recovery and women’s new values.”

—Florence Martin, Professor of French and Francophone Literature and Film, Goucher College, USA

“This comprehensive volume delivers that rarest of combinations, a study equally impressive in both breadth and depth as it explores complexly imbricated constructs of women, value, and the francophone. Both readable and searching, accessible and probing, Cherchez la femme—as its title implies—converts clichés about ‘women,’ ‘values’ and ‘the francophone world,’ even as it obliges us to renounce them, into exhilarating discoveries.”

—Margaret E. Gray, Associate Professor of French, Indiana University

Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
Price Us Usd: 59.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)