Essays on major French authors of the 17th century.

In this work Professor McMahon takes a new approach to interpreting the most canonized century in French literature. By viewing literature as essentially a cultural practice, she offers an unconventional reading of canonical masterpieces of the era (Corneille's Medee, Moliere's La Bourgeois gentilhomme, Racine's Phedre, and La Fontaine's Fables) to the extent that these works are compared to "non-literary" texts which focus on the human body. "Classics Incorporated" draws on extensive archival research into such unfamiliar historical sources as cookbooks, shopping guides, treatises on medicine and monstrosity, and dance manuals. Because of this insistence on treating literature as part of a given culture and historicising texts in a novel manner, "Classics Incorporated" stands apart as a critical study that can appeal to a diverse audience: those who are interested in cultural criticism, popular culture, cultural history, and critical theory alike.

Examining literary discourses on female friendship and intimacy in seventeenth-century France, this study takes as its premise the view that, unlike men, women have been denied for centuries the possibility of same sex friendship. The author explores the effect of this homosocial and homopriviledged heritage on the deployment and constructions of female friendship and homoerotic relationships as thematic narratives in works by male and female writers in seventeenth-century France. The book consists of three parts: the first surveys the history of male thinkers' denial of female friendship, concluding with a synopsis of the cultural representations of female same-sex practices. The second analyzes female intimacy and homoerotism as imagined, appropriated and finally repudiated by Honoré d'Urfé's pastoral novel, L'Astrée, and Isaac de Benserade's seemingly lesbian-friendly comedy, Iphis et Iante. The third turns to unprecedented depictions of female intimate and homoerotic bonds in Madeleine de Scudéry's novel Mathilde and Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force's fairy tale Plus Belle que Fée. This study reveals a female literary genealogy of intimacies between women in seventeenth-century France, and adds to the research in lesbian and queer studies, fields in which pre-eighteenth-century French literary texts are rare.

This book builds a picture of how Greek literature was reworked by the authors of seventeenth-century French tragedy. The text explores the complex interactions surrounding these adaptations, involving the input of scribes, editors, translators and earlier authors, and asks the important question of what these dramatists conceived of themselves as doing.