In Gender in the Fiction of George Sand, Françoise Massardier-Kenney argues that the major nineteenth-century French writer George Sand articulates in her novels a complex and extremely modern conception of gender, questioning prevalent patriarchal modes of discourse and redefining masculinity and femininity. Through the analysis of a representative sample of Sand's works (Indiana, Jacques, La dernière Aldini, Jeanne, Horace, Valv'dre, Melle la Quintinie, Gabriel, Lucrezia Floriana, and Nanon), Massardier-Kenney uncovers the themes and strategies used by Sand to challenge essentializing and negative representations of women. Gender in the Fiction of George Sand demonstrates the centrality of Sand's pioneering exploration of the construction of gender. This original study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century French literature and culture, women's literature, and gender studies.

In Gender in the Fiction of George Sand, Françoise Massardier-Kenney argues that the major nineteenth-century French writer George Sand articulates in her novels a complex and extremely modern conception of gender, questioning prevalent patriarchal modes of discourse and redefining masculinity and femininity. Through the analysis of a representative sample of Sand's works (Indiana, Jacques, La dernière Aldini, Jeanne, Horace, Valv'dre, Melle la Quintinie, Gabriel, Lucrezia Floriana, and Nanon), Massardier-Kenney uncovers the themes and strategies used by Sand to challenge essentializing and negative representations of women. Gender in the Fiction of George Sand demonstrates the centrality of Sand's pioneering exploration of the construction of gender. This original study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century French literature and culture, women's literature, and gender studies.

"Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-1876), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness reveals how Sands novels repeatedly focus on a nexus of language, masculinity and power, in which narrative is both a vehicle for the expression of manhood, and a site where masculinity is discursively performed. Masculinity is thus reconfigured in Sands fiction as an identity constituted as much through words as through actions. Analysis of the performances of masculinity staged in Sands novels opens onto an exploration of gendered processes of literary representation: the links between masculinity and the doxa, the equation of writing and power, the homosocial function of acts of narration, and the masculinity of authorship and authority."

A reanalysis of Sand's major writing, ranging from her early short stories to her later fiction, which identifies her writing as an example of an aesthetic mode often associated with femininity. The study compares Sand's place in the history of the realist novel to that of her male counterparts.

Does gender have a poetics: What difference does gender make? How does it affect writing, reading, and the functions of text in society? The Poetics of Gender is a brilliant assembly of leading feminist critics whose collective effort presents the most up-to-date research on these important issues. The range of techniques and theories represented here are applied across a broad spectrum of texts and cultural forms, extending from women's writing of the Renaissance and the fiction of George Sand to the relation between quiltmaking and nineteenth-century literary forms, the pornography of Georges Bataille, and the theories of Julia Kristeva.

Sandian heroines swirl around men in their sororal and sartorial disguises like moths around candle flames. However, as Disguise in George Sand's Novels illustrates, the disguise is not an instrument to seduce men but rather to assert the heroines' true selves. The portrayal of female and androgynous protagonists in Rose et Blanche (1831), Indiana (1832), Lélia (1833/39), Gabriel (1839), Consuelo (1842), and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1844) is a metaphor to demonstrate the continuity of identities before and after the disguise as George Sand stipulates in her theory of the ménechme. Disguise in George Sand's Novels explores the maturation process of Romantic and artistically inclined heroines and highlights the spiritual meaning of the disguise as a rite of passage for the birth of a new type of protagonist: spiritual, self-assertive, and dedicated to erasing gender inequality and helping the poor.