The French writer Colette (1873–1954) is best known in the United States for such classic novels as Gigi and Cheri, which were made into popular movies, but she was a prolific author. This ...meticulously translated collection offers some of her best fiction, personal essays, articles, and talks, all appearing in English for the first time. The pieces showcase Colette's gifts as a writer: her deep wisdom about every age of human life, her skill as a storyteller, her wry humor, her persuasive powers, and her foresight as a social critic of issues such as gender roles. The translators combed through journals and past editions of Colette's work to cull these gems, which cover an enormous array of topics—from French wines and perfumes to her friendships with Marcel Proust and Maurice Chevalier to uncanny insight into the curious habits of cats and dogs. Selections from an advice column that Colette wrote for the French women's magazine Marie Claire are also included, and her savvy suggestions for the lovelorn stand the test of time. Moving articles written during the two world wars, along with her memories of being an actor and playwright, reveal facets of her writing that are less often celebrated. The first new work by Colette to appear in English in half a century, it will delight devoted fans and new readers alike.
What might the author of Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own have in common with the author of the Claudine series and The Pure and the Impure? Resisting long-held interpretations that Colette and ...Virginia Woolf had little in common, Southworth shows here the links between the two famous writers, both real and imagined. Often cast in their diametrically opposed roles of elitist bluestocking and risqué music hall performer, critics have overlooked the many ways in which the lives and works of Woolf and Colette intersect. This study provides a broad-ranging introduction to the biographical, stylistic, and thematic ties that link the lives and works of Britain's and France's first ladies of letters of the early twentieth century. Situating the two writers within an international network of artists and literati, including Jacques-Émile Blanche, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Winnie de Polignac, Gisele Freund, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, this study complicates conceptions of the differences—national, sexual, cultural, and intellectual—which have kept these two women apart by placing these same differences at its center. Southworth develops work already undertaken on Woolf's contacts with France and adds to the body of comparative work on Woolf and her contemporaries. This study also highlights as yet unexplored connections between Colette and her British and American peers. Southworth’s book makes a significant contribution to gay and lesbian studies and the study of modernist culture. It also demonstrates the potential of social network theory for literary studies.
Polymorphous Domesticities maps out the play of gender, sexuality, and alternative forms of domesticity in the works of four modern European and American writers—Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Colette, ...and J. R. Ackerley. What these four writers have in common is a defiance of patriarchal paradigms in their lives as well as in their works. Not only did they live outside the norms of the heterosexual family unit, they also pursued and wrote about alternative lifestyles that prominently involved animals. Through close readings from a feminist perspective, Juliana Schiesari reconfigures the ways in which interspecies relationships inflect domestic spheres, reading the "Other" through the lens of gender, home, and family. As she explores how domestic life is refigured by the presence of animals, Schiesari challenges anthropocentric frames of reference and brings the very definition of "human' into question.
In France’s Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake ...their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village’s battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873–1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.
Notre Colette Brunet, Alain; Charles-Roux, Edmonde; Ducrey, Guy ...
2004
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
« Notre » Colette… Des regards croisés se posent dans ces pages sur une œuvre décidément inclassable. Si la vie de l’écrivain – particulièrement dans son rapport à l’histoire – pique la curiosité au ...moins autant que ses livres, ceux-ci fournissent matière à de nouvelles réflexions : ils nous concernent, ici et maintenant, parce qu’ils évoquent une jouissance et des amours sans frontières, parce qu’ils chantent le culte de l’instant dilaté et maîtrisé, parce qu’ils osent présenter – et parfois préférer – les monstres. Ils laissent entrevoir la « femme cachée », les forces clandestines qui ouvrent la voie à l’écriture, suscitent d’étonnants personnages, et tracent un alphabet du monde. Cheminement très maîtrisé d’ailleurs, comme le montrent la mise en scène soignée des multiples images de l’écrivain, ou les étincelants paradoxes de son portrait inattendu en moraliste. Cette Colette-là est nôtre, parce qu’elle est autre…
Dieser Band lasst sich auf das Paradox ein, von einer literarischen Gendertheorie zu sprechen. Proust wie auch die zwei Jahre jungere Colette, die sich als seine literarische Zwillingsschwester sah ...und in Deutschland noch wiederzuentdecken ist, mochten die Literatur nicht mit dem Preisetikett der Theorie und Ideologie belasten. In Wirklichkeit aber wird dieses Theorieverbot von den literarischen Ouvres selbst unaufhorlich unterlaufen. Die Fulle der Detailwahrnehmung momentaner kinetischer, mimischer, gestischer, vokaler Eigenarten und ihrer Metamorphosen ist stets mit einem Reichtum an Reflexionen individuellen wie sozialen Verhaltens verknupft. Der Band ist konsequent auf diesen originellen Thesaurus einer impliziten Theorie von Eros und Sexualitat, Gesellschaft und Geschlecht fokussiert.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, a short-lived but extraordinary cultural phenomenon spread throughout Europe and the United States-"Salomania." The term was coined when biblical ...bad girl Salome was resurrected from the Old Testament and reborn on the modern stage in Oscar Wilde's 1893 playSalomeand in Richard Strauss's 1905 opera based on it. Salome quickly came to embody the turn-of-the-century concept of the femme fatale. She and the striptease Wilde created for her, "The Dance of the Seven Veils," soon captivated the popular imagination in performances on stages high and low, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Ziegfeld Follies.This book details for the first time the Salomania craze and four remarkable women who personified Salome and performed her seductive dance: Maud Allan, a Canadian modern dancer; Mata Hari, a Dutch spy; Ida Rubinstein, a Russian heiress; and French novelist Colette. Toni Bentley masterfully weaves the stories of these women together, showing how each embraced the persona of the femme fatale and transformed the misogynist idea of a dangerously sexual woman into a form of personal liberation. Bentley explores how Salome became a pop icon in Europe and America, how the real women who played her influenced the beginnings of modern dance, and how her striptease became in the twentieth century an act of glamorous empowerment and unlikely feminism.Sisters of Salomeis a dramatic account of an ancient myth played out onstage and in real life, at the fascinating edge where sex and art, desire and decency, merge.
The subject of this thesis is the female characters' way of seeing in the works of Colette. Colette helps liberate women from an oppressive concept of femininity, this being the ultimate goal of the ...postmodern feminists (Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray). In Colette's works we find several characteristics that show her resistance to the dominant ideology, the most important being an emphasis placed elsewhere than upon things considered important in patriarchal culture.
Renee Nere of La Vagabonde, novelist and music-hall mime, is examined in the second chapter. For Renee, liberty is more important than the security of the established identity which marriage offers. The pain associated with her choice to remain alone underscores the oppression that she must bear.
"Colette" in La Naissance du jour is studied in Chapter Three. There we discuss the importance of "Sido" in the construction of "Colette's" life model, a construction that never ends. The differences between mother (poet) and daughter (novelist) are studied along with their similarities. Again, reflection and writing are found to be more noble than love.
