Throughout her works, Colette sought to recreate the "earthly paradise" of her native land, Burgundy, and the complex dream it represented. This dream unfolds and metamorphoses into an inner ...landscape which brings back the nostalgia for the lost paradise of childhood, the powerful memory of her mother, Sido, and her gardens, and enfolded within these two motives, an Edenic quest for fusion and communication with nature. This quest leads to the invention of a dazzling writing, a "new alphabet" of metaphors which seeks to let the earth speak, and in which the native land is reinvented as a paradise from which all separations are abolished.
During her lifetime, French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954) insisted on her political antifeminism, but after her death she was celebrated by American feminists as a liberatory figure ...of women's empowerment, and as an important writer of women's experiences. Colette was taken up by American feminists through the marketing of her works as feminist by publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, the incorporation of her texts into anthologies of women's writing with consciousness-raising aims, and her popular reception in publications such as Ms. Magazine. The appeal of Colette, inspired by her biography as well as her literary oeuvre, was her depiction of women's lives.
En partant de l’hypothèse selon laquelle le traducteur, fort de son bagage cognitif, interprète le texte qu’il traduit et que la traduction est un phénomène de réécriture, cet article analyse la ...version espagnole de l’œuvre de la romancière française Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, Claudine à Paris, traduite par Piñas en 1963. L’objectif de cette analyse est de démontrer comment une circonstance historique concrète, la censure imposée par la dictature franquiste, influe sur la traduction.
Rather than using literary texts to evidence an analytic argument, within this piece we read Julia McNair Wright's (US, 1840-1902), Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's (France, 1873-1954), and Willa Cather's ...(US, 1873-1947) texts through theoretical lenses that expose their educational meaning and value and that create conversation among them concerning girls' and women's educations. While we do not claim that one can generalize these women's works and lessons to every life, we contend that these women and the literary products they created offer girls and women powerful lessons about resistance, subversion, and nurturing one's intellect, lessons that in some ways transcend class and race in particular. First, we define and explain Bruner's concept of the more using Rosenblatt, Gallagher, and Gardner's theories and findings to illuminate his concept. Next, we identify and examine three themes that emerge across these authors' texts-subverting through the everyday, becoming one's own steward, and moving from survival to self-actualization. Establishing these themes first in Wright's texts, we then use them to frame Colette's and Cather's fiction and support these themes by focusing on one lesson that emerges from each author's work(s). Finally, we ask what one might learn about educating girls and women from these texts and others whose educative meaning and value remain hidden.
While popular fiction in the belle epoque relished the image of the music hall as a sphere of moral and physical laxity and sensual excess, Colette's stories and novels such as La vagabonde and ...Envers du music hall depicted a music hall of earnest labor, thrift, and modesty. More than simply a performance, the craft labor and domestic probity that Colette valorized in her life and fiction during this period were elements of a tension ridden mental structure, a way of ordering the world specific to the Third Republic's morale laique. In portraying her music hall and literary careers in this way Colette attempted to reconcile her unconventional lifestyle with her culturally shaded notions of work and moral soundness. Indeed, middle class femininity itself was implicated in a new laic moral structure that glorified wage paying labor and professional metier in a novel way. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article considers the effects of the First World War on gender relations as they are perceived and represented in Colette's 1926 novel La Fin de Cheri. It discusses two interconnected aspects of ...the novel's evocation of the upper echelons of post-war French society. First, it focuses on the ways in which the novel intersects with the 1920s debate on gender identity, which conflates with a more generalized sense of cultural despair that was discernible after 1918 in diverse political, social and literary discourses. Whereas some commentators have argued that the novel reproduces reactionary and anti-feminist post-war stereotypes, this article suggests that the ambiguities evident in the figures of Edmee and Cheri work to reveal the inconsistencies and limitations of the ideals of femininity and masculinity that were widely promoted during this period. Second, the article examines in more detail the depiction of a returning soldier suffering from war-induced neurasthenia. I argue that the eponymous hero's psychological trauma is contrasted with Lea's more positive adaptation to a post-war world. I conclude, however, that Colette's novel equally flags up the difficulties inherent for both characters as they attempt to negotiate a space for their identity within the competing gender discourses of 1920s France.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on Colette's writing for the periodical press, particularly her writing on fashion, and sets out to discuss it in terms of its capacity to effect the high purposes of satire. Its ...method of reading is contextualizing, rather than immanent — it brings it into relation with a number of issues on which it bears: the history of fashion, the history of the body, generational change, the visual determinants of the fashions of the early twentieth century. Although humour is prominent, Colette is not content merely to make jokes. Ancient satire, which derives from the rhetoric of praise and blame, is the source of literary and art criticism, and Colette borrows both its modes and its vocation to elevate fashion writing to the level of cultural critique. Moralistic, it teaches something about social mores by making fun of them. Hence, Colette makes us laugh at the fact that fashion affects not only clothes, but bodies; style fashions the body and hence the self.
Poiana examines two twentieth-century French pieces of self writing, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette's Etoile Vesper and Michel Leiris' Fourbis, focusing particularly on the signs of aggressivity that ...appear in the texts. In Etoile Vesper, Colette establishes an intimate connection between self-writing and the pain and physical incapacitation of the arthritis sufferer. In Fourbis, Leiris mounts another charge against the forces that oppress him, but before he does so, he reviews his strengths and weaknesses and considers the precautions he should take in order to avoid further fiascos.
Southworth describes something analogous to collaboration, a social network of mutual, overlapping, and contiguous friends and acquaintances (including, among others, the Singer Sewing Machine ...heiress Winnie de Polignac; the composer, suffragist, and writer Ethyl Smyth; the writers Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, Radclyffe Hall, and her lover, Una Troubridge; the poet Comtesse Anna de Noailles; and photographer Gisele Freund) that created a link between Sidonie Gabrielle Colette and Virginia Woolf, who probably never met or directly corresponded with each other. She further enumerates various social and literary points of contact between Colette and Woolf, and demonstrates how "tightly interconnected" were French and English modernisms.
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