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Masculinity is becoming an increasingly popular area of study in areas as diverse as sociology, politics and cultural studies, yet significant research is lacking into connections between masculinity and literature. Signs of Masculinity aims at beginning to fill the gap. Starting with an introduction to, and intervention within, numerous debates concerning the cultural construction of various masculinities, the volume then continues with an investigation of representations of masculinity in literature from 1700 to the present. Close readings of texts are intended to demonstrate that masculinity is not a theoretical abstract, but a definitive textual and cultural phenomenon that needs to be recognised in the study of literature. It is hoped that the wide-ranging essays, which raise numerous issues, and are written from a variety of methodological approaches, will appeal to undergraduate, postgraduates and lecturers interest in the crucial but under-researched area of masculinity.

Le présent ouvrage reprend en termes contemporains le dialogue littéraire entamé de leur vivant par Balzac et Sand et revient sur les notions d’origine et de genèse telles qu’elles se déploient chez ces deux auteurs. La discussion engage les champs romanesque, individuel, social et politique, rapprochant et parfois opposant deux écrivains d’une fécondité exceptionnelle, l’un catalogué comme réaliste, l’autre comme idéaliste, mais tous deux inséparables de leurs origines romantiques et de la coupure révolutionnaire. C’est ainsi que leur œuvre comporte une profonde réflexion sur le rapport de l’artiste à la tradition et à la nouveauté – à la production et à la reproduction, qu’il s’agisse de création artistique, de rapports de filiation ou de mutations politiques. En oeuvrant sur l’idée de genèse, le roman investit le corps féminin, la différence des sexes, le désir et la Loi.

Fabulous Identities revises traditional interpretations of the fairy-tale vogue which was dominated by salon women in the last decade of the French seventeenth century. This study of women's tale narratives is set into an investigation of how aristocratic identity was transformed by political and social realignments forced by royal absolutism or ambitious materialism. Women's distinctive contributions to the genre are defined by drawing upon various texts that articulated the century's moral, cultural, and aesthetic values, as well as upon contemporary critical perspectives including seventeenth-century historical and cultural studies.
Caught up in the philosophical, political and social controversy over woman's nature, seventeenth-century women writers benefited from salon culture and their access to writing through the literary genres of fairy tales and novels, to explore new identities and expand representations of subjectivity. Women's tales can be seen as a theater for staging an authorial persona at odds with their portrait as presented in male-authored didactic treatises and in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault. At a time when the pressures of social conformity weighed heavily upon them, the conteuses highlight through metamorphosis the affective dimension together with its impact on evolving notions of personal autonomy.

How does gender shape memory? What role does literature play in cultural remembering? These are two of the questions to which the present volume is addressed. Even if we agree that remembering is not biologically determined, we can assume that memory is influenced by the particular social, cultural and historical conditions in which individuals find themselves. And since men and women generally assume different social and cultural roles, their way of remembering should also differ. So, do women and men remember different events, narrate different stories, and narrate or read them in different ways? Gendered Memories, then, not only looks at memory gendered by literature, but also wants to know how gender shapes the memory of literature.

In English here is presented for the first time an examination of the text and context of five nineteenth-century French women poets: Elisa Mercoeur (1808-1835), Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), Louisa Siefert (1845-1877), Louise Ackermann (1813-1890) and Louise Michel (1830-1905) will demonstrate that in spite of mentoring by various literary, historic or even family figures, these writers found their own voices. A striking example is Louisa Siefert, who in spite of bold intertextuality, displays an unmistakably feminine persona, whose originality poignantly draws the reader's attention. These poets had many obstacles of overcome as woman-identified poets. For example, Louise Ackermann's own husband did not want her to write, and for this reason, she remained silent during her who years of marriage. Louise Michel is a different case as an analysis of the short poem Bouche close ( Le Livre du Bagne, 1873-1880) will demonstrate. In short, Uncanonical Women,//% explores a crescendo of poetic voice, from the initial timid solicitations of Elisa Mercoeur, to the bold, self-sufficient defiance of Louise Michel. The implication of my original findings that uncanonical poets can surpass cultural marginalization is that the book will target both a traditional and modern readership. Major these and clear language and tools that delineate identifiably personal style of true writers and the poetic persona of each is unique: Mercoeur in ambition, Desbordes-Valmore in domesticity, Siefert, in anguish, Ackermann in pessimism and Michel in leadership.

In a land caught between the sea and cloud, where the natural landscape still refuses civilization, there are those; the composers of words, tellers of tales, that help shape the minds of the people that live on its shores. They are spiritcarvers.
New Zealand writing today is engaging in an intent struggle to subvert multiple shapes into voices. These interviews, as a record of biographical orature, are shaped into presenting the figure of the storyteller through memory and language; explorations of how we imagine and create ourselves with and into words. Here we encounter the dichotomy of fiction and non-fiction, myth and consensual reality, imagination and truth: do we live within our own selected fictions? Identity is shaped by the authors' sense of displacement as well as of belonging - meeting otherness with dispossession, discovering connection through isolation.
Among the focal points of the interviews are the role of women's writing, Maori writing, interrelations among different cultures, and the influence of literary and oral tradition within New Zealand.

This volume stems from the idea that the notion of borders and borderlines as clear-cut frontiers separating not only political and geographical areas, but also cultural, linguistic and semiotic spaces, does not fully address the complexity of contemporary cultural encounters. Centering on a whole range of literary works from the United States and the Caribbean, the contributors suggest and discuss different theoretical and methodological grounds to address the literary production taking place across the lines in North American and Caribbean culture. The volume represents a pioneering attempt at proposing the concept of the border as a useful paradigm not only for the study of Chicano literature but also for the other American literatures. The works presented in the volume illustrate various aspects and manifestations of the textual border(lands), and explore the double-voiced discourse of border texts by writers like Harriet E. Wilson, Rudolfo Anaya, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Helena Viramontes, Paule Marshall and Monica Sone, among others. This book is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of comparative American studies and ethnic studies.

Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-ca. 1430)—whether read as lyric poet, prose polemicist or historian, feminist or universal moralist—has over the past thirty years become more widely read than any other medieval French author. The attraction of her works continues to grow amongst the general public, as well as among critics and historians of literature, ideas, science and the visual arts, political scientists and philologists, and specialists in feminist theory. Christine intrigues readers by her intellectual paradoxes as much as by her prefiguration of modern attitudes by and toward women.
This collection of essays honours Angus J. Kennedy, an illustrious scholar who has greatly contributed to fostering this modern growth in interest. The editors here present a significant sampling of varieties of inquiry on Christine: a broad range of contributors, from around the world, represent different approaches and levels of experience. The volume contains two indexes, and a bibliography structured to serve as an integrated and integral reference source to pertinent primary and secondary materials. This volume thus charts the progress of Christine de Pizan studies at the start of the new millennium. True to the spirit of its honoree, it also aims to serve as a gateway to future research.

Omniprésente dans son oeuvre mais loin d'être glorieuse, la maternité se trouve au centre de l'univers littéraire de Marguerite Duras. Le désir de retourner dans le sein maternel et l'impossibilité d'y parvenir se confondent dans le jeu de l'écriture pour composer le refrain sans fin qu'est ce désir d'osmose.
Dans cette étude, l'auteur se propose d'aller au-delà du lien entre l'omniprésence du personnage maternel et la réalité biographique de Duras en soulignant le caractère fictionnel de l'oeuvre. Des analyses textuelles rhétoriques et narratologiques lui permettent de souligner les représentations de la maternité et de la féminité dans les textes de Duras et dans la théorie psychanalytique freudienne. La confrontation de ces deux discours résulte en un dialogue entre Duras et Freud où les deux locuteurs fictifs sont respectés, mais soumis à une analyse critique. La question qui s'impose est de savoir si l'oeuvre de Duras contribue à confirmer la différence sexuelle définie dans le contexte social et ancrée dans la relation avec la mère, comme le prétend la psychanalyse freudienne, ou si elle contribue justement à la remise en question de cette différence sociale.
L'écriture de Duras manie les clichés culturels et les mythes qui entourent la mère et la maternité. Ceci se manifeste sous des aspects d'une grande variété. Cette thèse montre le jeu des variations sur les fantasmes soi-disant universels, variations qui se dessinent dans les répétitions apparentes qui prennent à chaque fois une forme nouvelle. L'originalité de Duras est de prendre les mythes et les fantasmes à la lettre, et ce procédé les rend parfois grotesques. La forme littéraire paradoxale donnée à ces fantasmes renverse le rapport entre le littéral et le figuré. Sans être moralisateurs, ils mettent ainsi en lumière le caractère fantasmatique de l'idéologie qui ancre la féminité dans la maternité.
Même maintenant, dix ans après le décès de Marguerite Duras, son œuvre inspire toujours de nombreux lecteurs. L'année du dixième anniversaire de sa mort célèbre cette oeuvre qui continue à nous fasciner. Le présent livre vous offre le plaisir d'une lecture enrichissante des fantasmes entourant le personnage de la mère. A travers une lecture qui adopte la littéralité et qui s'ajuste aux méandres du texte durassien, l'auteur de ce livre veut contribuer à mieux comprendre les conflits et les désirs, les fantasmes et les images, qui entourent le rôle féminin par excellence qu'est la maternité.