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This work brings to bear multiple perspectives in a study of forensic storytelling in 18th century France. Women who were consigned to convents wrote letters to respond to the legal documents served against them. These responses have both historical and literary merit and form the core of an understudied genre.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
- Chapter One: Forensic Storytelling and Antimonarchical Epistolarity
- Chapter Two: Les Causes Célèbres, Factum or Fiction? Or: "That's What He Said!"
- Chapter Three: Tanastès est Satan: Authenticity and Audacity in the Writings of Marie-Madeleine Bonafon
- Chapter Four:Excess or Success? The Case of Mme Geneviève de Gravelle
- Chapter Five: "What's in a Name?": The Case of Angélique Schwab
Conclusion
Index
About the author
Barbara Abrams is Professor of French and Women's and Gender Studies and is Chair of the Department of History, Language, and Global Culture at Suffolk University, Boston. Her academic work focuses on French literature of the Enlightenment and Women's and Gender Studies. Her recent publications include several articles on women's epistolary writing in eighteenth-century France, the Factum as Fiction, and a new critical focus on the novels of Marie-Madeleine Bonafon. Her previous books include a multigraph project titled
Reframing Rousseau's Le Lévite d'Ephraïm: The Hebrew Bible, Hospitality, and Modern Identity (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment) and
Le Bizarre and Le Décousu in the Novels and Theoretical Works of Denis Diderot: How the Idea of Marginality Originated in Eighteenth-Century France, which examines the background of our modern concept of marginality by focusing on Diderot's materialist philosophy.
