Prosecuted for obscenity in her novel Monsieur Venus, Marguerite Eymery (pen name Rachilde), an apparently genteel young woman from a provincial bourgeois family, burst onto the French literary scene in 1884 amid scandal. This story of a sadistic transvestite and her pretty male lover was the first in a long series of novels, plays and stories dealing often in the most macabre and sensationalistic terms with sadism, gender inversion, and sexual desire.
At the heart of the French literary world, Rachilde's life and writing defied patriarchal rules, particularly in relation to female sexuality, but she consistently and vehemently rejected feminism. Her extraordinary life and work, including a vast output as a literary reviewer, offer a prism through which to view the vibrant social and cultural history of France from the belle epoque to the Second World War. This book is the first serious critical study of Rachilde's work. Exploring the interwoven themes of French naturalism, modernism, decadence and feminism, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in French culture, literature and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century.

The 1950s and 1960s were a key moment in the development of postwar France. The period was one of rapid change, derived from post-World War II economic and social modernization; yet many traditional characteristics were retained. By analyzing the eruption of the new postwar world in the context of a France that was both modern and traditional, we can see how these worlds met and interacted, and how they set the scene for the turbulent 1960s and 70s. The examination of the development of mass culture in post-war France, undertaken in this volume, offers a valuable insight into the shifts that took place. By exploring stardom from the domain of cinema and other fields, represented here by famous figures such as Brigitte Bardot, Johnny Hallyday or Jean-Luc Godard, and less conventionally treated areas of enquiry (politics [de Gaulle], literary [Francoise Sagan], and intellectual culture [Levi-Strauss]) the reader is provided with a broad understanding of the mechanisms of popularity and success, and their cultural, social, and political roles. The picture that emerges shows that many cultural articulations remained or became identifiably "French," in spite of the American mass-culture origins of these social, economic, and cultural transformations.

The 1950s and 1960s were a key moment in the development of postwar France. The period was one of rapid change, derived from post-World War II economic and social modernization; yet many traditional characteristics were retained. By analyzing the eruption of the new postwar world in the context of a France that was both modern and traditional, we can see how these worlds met and interacted, and how they set the scene for the turbulent 1960s and 70s. The examination of the development of mass culture in post-war France, undertaken in this volume, offers a valuable insight into the shifts that took place. By exploring stardom from the domain of cinema and other fields, represented here by famous figures such as Brigitte Bardot, Johnny Hallyday or Jean-Luc Godard, and less conventionally treated areas of enquiry (politics [de Gaulle], literary [Francoise Sagan], and intellectual culture [Levi-Strauss]) the reader is provided with a broad understanding of the mechanisms of popularity and success, and their cultural, social, and political roles. The picture that emerges shows that many cultural articulations remained or became identifiably "French," in spite of the American mass-culture origins of these social, economic, and cultural transformations.

The Third Republic, known as the "belle epoque," was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women's history. Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds, UK. She has published widely on French women writers, including Colette, Rachilde, Renee Vivien, and bestselling romantic authors of the Belle Epoque. Her recent publications include Rachilde Decadence Gender and the Woman Writer (Berg, 2001), and she is working on a study of romance in 20th century France. Carrie Tarr is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Kingston, UK. She has published extensively on gender and ethnicity in French cinema. Her recent publications include Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (with B. Rollet, 2001) and Reframing Difference: beur and banlieue cinema in France (2005).

The Third Republic, known as the 'belle epoque', was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women's history.

Cinema provides entertainment, but it also communicates a set of values, a vision of the world or an ideology. From its beginnings more than a century ago, European cinema has dealt with the tension between these two functions in a variety of ways: at the extremes, dictatorial regimes have sweetened the pill of ideology with the sugar of entertainment. Meanwhile, spectators have persisted in seeking out, above all, the pleasure film can provide. Now available again in paperback, this book explores the complex relationship between entertainment, ideology and audiences in European film, through studies that range from the Stalinist musicals of the 1930s, to cinematic representations of masculinity under Franco, to recent French films and their Hollywood remakes. Diverse and entertaining, this study is addressed to students of film - especially French, German, Russian or Spanish - and to those readers and academics interested in both the history of cinema and in European culture. -- .

This book brings together a series of challenging essays which explore the complex intersections of feminism, narrative and genre. The essays were written as tributes to the leading feminist scholar Elizabeth Fallaize.

Truffaut shot to fame in 1959 with his first film "Les 400 Coups," a semi-autobiographical narrative shot in the low-budget neo-realist style of the emerging "Nouvelle Vague." He went on to make twenty-three films in twenty-six years, films which have entertained, provoked debate and caused controversy. This fresh appraisal of his work provides a useful socio-political contextualization and gives an overview of his films and film-making methods, shedding new light on key aspects such as sexual politics, the construction of masculinity, the exploitation of genre and the tension throughout the films between the "absolute" and the "provisional."

This groundbreaking book is about what 'popular culture' means in France, and how the term's shifting meanings have been negotiated and contested. It represents the first theoretically informed study of the way that popular culture is lived, imagined, fought over and negotiated in modern and contemporary France. It covers a wide range of overarching concerns: the roles of state policy, the market, political ideologies, changing social contexts and new technologies in the construction of the popular. But it also provides a set of specific case studies showing how popular songs, stories, films, TV programmes and language styles have become indispensable elements of 'culture' in France. Deploying yet also rethinking a 'Cultural Studies' approach to the popular, the book therefore challenges dominant views of what French culture really means today. -- .

Romance in modern times is the most widely read yet the most critically despised of genres. Associated almost entirely with women, as readers and as writers, its popularity has been argued by gender traditionalists to confirm women's innate sentimentality, while feminist critics have often condemned the genre as a dangerous opiate for the female masses. This study adopts the more positive perspective of critics such as Janice Radway, and takes seriously the pleasure that women readers consistently seem to find in romance. Drawing on the social constructionist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, the psychoanalytical theories of Jessica Benjamin, and a range of social theorists from Bourdieu to Zygmunt Bauman, the book uncovers the history of romantic fiction in France from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, and explores its place in women's lives and imaginations. Romance is not defined - as it usually is - solely in terms of its mass-market form. Rather, the history of women's popular fiction is traced in its full context, as one dimension of a literary story that encompasses the mainstream or 'middlebrow' as well as 'high' culture. Thus this study ranges from the formula romance (from the pious but popular Delly to global brand Harlequin), through 'middlebrow' bestsellers like Marcelle Tinayre, Francoise Sagan, Regine Deforges, to critically esteemed stories of love in the work of such authors as Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Elsa Triolet, and Camille Laurens. Criss-crossing the boundaries of taste and class, as well as those of sexual orientation, the romance has been at times reactionary, at others progressive, utopian, and contestatory. It has played an important part in the lives of twentieth-century women, providing both a source of imaginative escape, and a fictional space in which to rehearse and make sense of identity, relationship, and desire.

French feminism was central to the theory and culture of Second Wave feminism as an international movement, and 1975 was a key year for the women's movement in France. Through a critical review of the politics, activism and cultural creativity of that moment, from the perspective of both preceding and subsequent 'waves' of feminism, this book evaluates the legacies of 1975, and their strengths and limitations as new questions and new conjunctures have come into play. Edited and written by an international group of feminist scholars, it offers both a critical re-evaluation of a vital moment in women's cultural history, and a new analysis of the relationship between second wave agendas and contemporary feminist politics and culture.

This volume explores contemporary French women's writing through the prism of one of the defining moments of modern feminism: the writings of the 1970s that came to be known as "French feminism". With their exhilarating renewal of the rules of fiction, and a sophisticated theoretical approach to gender, representation and textuality, Helene Cixous and others became internationally recognised for their work, at a time when the women's movement was also a driving force for social change. Taking its cue from Les Femmes s'entetent, a multi-authored analysis of the situation of women and a celebration of women's creativity, this collection offers new readings of Monique Wittig, Emma Santos and Helene Cixous, followed by essays on Nina Bouraoui, Michele Perrein and Ying Chen, Marguerite Duras and Mireille Best, and Valentine Goby. A contextualising introduction establishes the theoretical and cultural framework of the volume with a critical re-evaluation of this key moment in the history of feminist thought and women's writing, pursuing its various legacies and examining the ways theoretical and empirical developments in queer studies, postcolonial studies and postmodernist philosophies have extended, inflected and challenged feminist work.

This volume brings together a series of essays which explore the complex intersections of feminism, narrative and genre. Drawing on a wide range of 19th and 20th century texts, novels, short stories and films they interrogate the relationship between situation and writing practice, and representations of history, memory, love, and old age.