Women Telling Nations highlights how, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, European women, as readers and writers, contributed to the construction of national identities. The book, which presents twenty countries, is divided into four parts. First, we examine how women belonged to nations: they represented territories and political or religious communities in their own style. Second, we deal with the ways in which women wrote the nation: the network of relationships in which they were involved that were not necessarily national or territorial. The legitimation that women writers succeeded in finding is emphasised in the third section, while in the fourth we analyse how and why women were open to the outside world, beyond the country's borders. Women Telling Nations underlines the quantitative importance of the circulation of these women's writings and demonstrates the extent as well as the impact of the international cross-fertilisation of nations, especially by and for women: focusing on routes rather than roots.

Suisse romande depuis son mariage, mais ayant passe la premiere moitie de sa vie aux Pays-Bas ou le francais etait devenu tres tot sa langue " naturelle ", Belle de Zuylen / Isabelle de Charriere joue quelque peu les trublions dans nos habitudes academiques. Lire son oeuvre - ses lettres, ses romans, ses pamphlets et ses pieces de theatre - c'est accepter des retouches a notre tableau des Lumieres qui n'en ressortira pas indemne ; c'est revoir les limites du champ de la critique litteraire, structure et hierarchise depuis le XIXe siecle en fonction de litteratures " nationales ". Bilingue (francais et anglais), ce recueil contient des articles bases sur les contributions a un colloque international qui s'est tenu a l'Universite d'Utrecht en avril 2005 pour commemorer le bicentenaire de la mort de l'ecrivaine. As a Dutch woman who spent half her life in Switzerland and chose French as her writing language, Belle de Zuylen / Isabelle de Charriere parades a defiant attitude towards the constraints of the literary field. To read with care her letters, her novels, pamphlets and plays means accepting some modifications to our picture of the Enlightenment, and obliges us to question the limits of the field of literary criticism such as it has been structured since the nineteenth century, that is, along the lines of national canons. This bilingual volume (English and French) contains articles based on contributions to the international congress that was organized at Utrecht University in April 2005 on the occasion of the bicentennial of the author's death.