L’Intime épistolaire (1850-1900): genre et pratique culturelle is a study of private letters by eight Nineteenth-Century French authors—Flaubert, Zola, Sand, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Eberhardt, Bashkirtseff and Edmond de Goncourt—during the period of 1850 to 1900. Through in-depth analyses of these intriguing documents, the book demonstrates that personal correspondences cast fresh light on the concept of intimacy in Nineteenth-Century French culture. Since epistolary writing implies a necessary exchange between lived experience and the written word, the book’s intention is also to interpret “letter practice” as a specific textual form, with its own generic expectations and constraints which are distinct from other life-writing genres such as the diary, the autobiography, and the memoir. Divided into five chapters, the study begins with a short introduction to the “culture of individuality.” The four subsequent chapters explore the poetics of epistolary writing, including significant topics, the various roles of the letter writer, epistolary pacts and the problem of the signature. Addressing a wide range of epistolary situations, including daily life, health, money problems, love, travel, and even suicide notes, the book also offers new critical perspectives on six of the most interesting manuscript letters that have been chosen from the examined sources.

This History is the first in a century to trace the development and impact of the novel in French from its beginnings to the present. Leading specialists explore how novelists writing in French have responded to the diverse personal, economic, socio-political, cultural-artistic and environmental factors that shaped their worlds. From the novel's medieval precursors to the impact of the internet, the History provides fresh accounts of canonical and lesser-known authors, offering a global perspective beyond the national borders of 'the Hexagon' to explore France's colonial past and its legacies. Accessible chapters range widely, including the French novel in Sub-Saharan Africa, data analysis of the novel system in the seventeenth century, social critique in women's writing, Sade's banned works and more. Highlighting continuities and divergence between and within different periods, this lively volume offers routes through a diverse literary landscape while encouraging comparison and connection-making between writers, works and historical periods.

Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment constitutes the first book-length feminist study of Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by women readers. By today's standards, Rousseau's sexual politics appear reactionary, paternalistic, even blatantly misogynist; yet, among his female contemporaries, his works often met with enthusiastic approval and had tremendous impact on their values and behavior. To probe Rousseau's paradoxical appeal to eighteenth-century readers, Mary Trouille examines how seven women authors responded to his writings and sexual politics and traces his influence on their lives and works. The writers include six Frenchwomen (Roland, d'Epinay, Stael, Genlis, Gouges, and an anonymous woman correspondent who called herself Henriette) and the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The book constitutes an important contribution to French literature, women's studies, and eighteenth-century cultural studies. While a great deal has already been written on the individual women whom Trouille treats, what distinguishes this book is that it places multiple female subjects directly opposite Rousseau, and succeeds in showing that the relationship between mentor and student(s) is both multi-layered and fascinatingly complex.