Subverting the family romance

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.

subjects: French fiction,  History,  History and criticism,  Kinship in literature,  Women and literature,  Women authors,  French fiction, history and criticism,  Sand, george, 1804-1876,  Charriere, isabelle de, 1740-1805

Places: France

Times: 18th century,  19th century