The subject of desire
Subtitle: Petrarchan poetics and the female voice in Louise Labé
By: Deborah Lesko Baker ; with a foreword by Tom Conley.
Series: Purdue studies in Romance literatures ;; v. 11
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: West Lafayette, Ind
Language: eng
Number of pages: 249
Subjects: Labé, Louise, 1526?-1566 -- Criticism and interpretation; Desire in literature; Women in literature; Women and literature -- France -- History -- 16th century; Poetics -- History -- 16th century
Description: The French Renaissance poet Louise Labe is one of the most striking and influential women writers of early modern Europe. In her broad-ranging volume of prose and poetic works (1555), Labe transforms the position of woman in Renaissance discourse from an object to a subject of erotic and artistic desire and privileges the notion of desire itself as a central issue for literary and psychic exploration.

Deborah Lesko Baker presents the dramatic creation and evolution of female subjectivity in Labe as a passionate quest for internal selfhood made possible through both authentic self-expression and interaction with others. In so doing she analyzes how the development of the female subject coincides with an ongoing interrogation of the inherited models of the Petrarchan lyric tradition.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-242) and index.