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This book identifies the prostitute memoir as a subgenre of the eighteenth-century French libertine novel and explores how the fictional utopia the narrators of these salacious pseudo-memoirs undermine the patriarchal hierarchies of the Ancien Régime and propose a social model in which women form networks of mutual support to achieve wealth and personal satisfaction.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Subversive Stories: Literary Contexts and Categories
2. Fact versus Fiction: Parisian Prostitutes Meet Libertine Fantasies
3.
La Belle Allemande, or The Empire of Beauty
4.
Margot la ravaudeuse, or The Libertine Public Sphere
5.
La Cauchoise, or Dear and Venerable Sisters
6.
Histoire de Juliette, or The Rejection of Motherhood
Appendix: Contexts and Summaries of the Putain Memoir Novels
Bibliography
Notes
About the author
Alistaire Tallent lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she is associate professor of French at Colorado College. She has published numerous book chapters and articles in such journals as
Romance Review,
French Forum, and
Theatrum historiae.
Summary
This book identifies the prostitute memoir as a subgenre of the eighteenth-century French libertine novel and explores how the fictional utopia the narrators of these salacious pseudo-memoirs undermine the patriarchal hierarchies of the Ancien Régime and propose a social model in which women form networks of mutual support to achieve wealth and personal satisfaction.
