Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France has been celebrated as the
period of conversation. Salons flourished and became an important social
force. Women and men worked together, in dialogue with their
contemporaries, other texts, and their culture to create novels,
political satire, drama, poetry, fairy tales, travel narratives, and
philosophy. Yet the inclusion of women's contributions, only recently
recovered, changes the way we conceive of the period that constitutes
one of the building blocks of French national identity and Western
civilization, and teachers are often unsure how and where to incorporate
the texts into their courses. Teaching Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers attempts to reconstruct these
conversations by integrating women's work into classrooms across the
curriculum. The works of French women writers are crucial to courses on
the early modern period and enliven many others--whether on literature,
history, women's history, the history of science, philosophy, women's
and gender studies, or European civilization. The essays included in
part 1 provide necessary background and help instructors identify places
in their courses that could be enriched by taking women's participation
into account. Contributors in part 2 focus on some of the central
writers and genres of the period, including Lafayette, Charrière, and
Graffigny, the epistolary novel, convent writing, and memoirs. The
essays in part 3 offer concrete descriptions of courses that place
women's texts in dialogue with those of their male colleagues or with
historical issues.
