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In Genius Envy Adrianna M. Paliyenko uncovers a forgotten past: the multiplicity and diversity of nineteenth-century French women’s poetic voices. Conservative critics of the time attributed genius to masculinity and dismissed the work of female authors as “feminine literature.” Despite the efforts of leading thinkers, critics, and historians to erase women from the pages of literary history, Paliyenko shows how female poets invigorated the debate about the origins of genius and garnered recognition in their time for their creativity and bold aesthetic ideas.This fresh account of French women poets’ contributions to literature probes the history of their critical reception and considers the texts of celebrated writers such as Desbordes-Valmore, Ségalas, Blanchecotte, Siefert, and Ackermann. The results show that these women explicitly challenged the notion of genius as gendered, advocating for their rightful place in the canon.

Literature

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Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past. It investigates the reasons why, for a group of French writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. For example, Hoffmann examines the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784); the “uchronotopia” of Lezay-Marnésia’s Lettres écrites des rives de l’Ohio (1800)—the imaginary perfect society set in America and based on what France might have become without the Revolution; and the political and nationalistic motivations behind Chateaubriand’s idealization of America in Voyage en Amérique (1827) and Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1850). From an historical perspective, Posthumous Americas works to determine when exactly these writers stopped transcribing what they actually observed in America and started giving imaginary accounts of their experiences.

Literature