About the Author:
Kelsey L. Haskett is associate professor of French and chair of the Modern Language Department at Trinity Western University.
Holly Faith Nelson is professor and chair of English and co-director of the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University.
Review:
Taken together, the essays in this volume, written by an array of junior and senior scholars teaching in American and Canadian universities, trace the waning social influence in France of Christianity and the institutional church (though not necessarily of God), even as they highlight the frequency with which individual Francophone women turn to the spiritual as a means of personal expression and literary resistance. Aside from a common language, the authors examined in this collection—which is organized in chronological order from the works of Christine de Pisan to the 21st-century Franco-Algerian author Malika Mokeddem's La Nuit de la Lézarde—all share an impetus to strike out on their own, to defy gender-based cultural confinement, and to challenge the organized church in one way or another. Trading religious orthodoxy for spiritual fulfillment, Marguerite de Navarre, Madame de Lafayette, George Sand, Simone Weil, and Marguerite Duras (and other less canonical writers) are presented here as pioneers forging unconventional paths toward God. Inspired by the work of the North American Christian Foreign Language Association, this collection gains momentum and purpose as it addresses more contemporary writers; the later essays are among the strongest. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates; graduate students. (CHOICE)
This book examines the role of the spiritual in the lives and works of selected French women writers from the Middle Ages to the (post)modern age. With chapters covering eleven different authors, it highlights the important contribution made by women writers to French literature in general and to spiritual growth, evolution, and reflection in France over the centuries.
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