Subverting the family romance
Subtitle: women writers, kinship structures, and the early French novel
By: Charlotte Daniels.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Lewisburg; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 187
Subjects: French fiction -- 18th century -- History and criticism.; Women and literature -- France -- History -- 18th century.; Women and literature -- France -- History -- 19th century.; French fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; French fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; Kinship in literature.
Description: "Drawing on Habermas and Freud as well as historians of the family, Daniels takes up the case of three women novelists each writing at a key moment in the parallel development of the novel genre and the modern family. She demonstrates that these writers - confronted with ever more reified exclusion from public life, and relegated to narrowly defined domestic roles - intervened in and subverted the process in their novels.

Daniels shows that women writers used the novel first to imagine different social rules that might define alternative kinship systems (Graffigny), and later to find - and create - loopholes within a firmly entrenched system of official and unofficial law (Charriere and Sand)." "Spanning a crucial period in the emergence of modernity, this interdisciplinary study addresses problems in French literary and social history, gender studies, and the history of mentalites."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-179) and index.