Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing

This book examines the significance of rhetoric and print culture in French Renaissance writing about women.

Floyd Gray (Author)

9780521773270, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 2000

240 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.52 kg

"...thought-provoking contribution to early modern French scholarship..." SubStance

In this book Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected both by rhetorical conventions and by the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry. Focusing on a wide range of discourses on gender issues - misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical - Gray reveals the extent to which these marginalized texts reflect literary concerns rather than social reality. He then moves from a close analysis of the rhetorical factor in the Querelle des femmes to consider ways in which writing, as a textual phenomenon, inscribes its own, sometimes ambiguous, meaning. Gray offers richly detailed readings of writing by Rabelais, Jean Flore, Montaigne, Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet and Marie de Gournay among others, challenging the inherent anachronism of those forms of criticism that fail to take account of the rhetorical and cultural conditions of the period.

Introduction
1. Discourses of misogyny
2. Irony and the sexual other
3. Anonymity and the poetics of regendering
4. The women in Montaigne's life
5. Sexual marginality
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]