Models of Women in Sixteenth-century French Literature

Download or read book Models of Women in Sixteenth-century French Literature written by Pollie Bromilow and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a feminist critique of the so-called crisis of exemplarity in late Renaissance texts by comparing and contrasting examples proposed to female readers in two collections of sixteenth-century French short stories, Pierre Boaistuau's Histoires tragiques and Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron. The author proposes that female exemplarity has its own poetics and cannot be considered simply as identical or symmetrical to male exemplarity. What emerges in the course of the study is an understanding of the different ways in which exemplarity enters the life of the female reader: through history, truth, invention, memory and strangeness.