Mary Orr – författare

Flaubert: Writing the Masculine offers a new approach to Flaubert's major writing and to gender studies as a whole. Through a combination of close reading with a knowledge of current gender studies and particular attention to the sociohistorical and legal contexts of nineteenth-century France, it examines the masculine in the six very different literary contexts which are Flaubert's fictions. His characters, male and female, are reassessed for their masculinity: Baudelaire's famous view of Emma Bovary as 'masculine', like other critical idées reçues which have propped up a canonical Flaubert, finds a new interpretation within the wider discussion of the book, as does the term 'masculine' itself. While it is mostly Flaubert's men, both those who conform to patriarchy's models and the non-conformists, who offer new insights into masculine identities in crisis, the structures of society that endorse male status–legal, social, institutional, and literary-critical–also come under scrutiny. The book challenges the primacy of gendered terms over sex, and provides various methodological resources to further scholarship in French Studies, Gender Studies, and masculinities theory, arguing strongly for the adroitness of literature to formulate representations which are as relevant today as in Flaubert's time.

This is the first comprehensive study in English of Flaubert's least well-known masterpiece, the final version of his Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) which, thanks to Foucault, has the reputation of being an arcane and erudite 'fantastic library' or, thanks to genetic criticism, is a 'narrative' of Flaubert's personal aesthetic ('oeuvre de toute ma vie'). By presuming instead no prior knowledge of the text, its versions or its contexts, Mary Orr provides new readings of the seven tableaux which comprise Temptation, and new ways of interpreting the work as a whole, whether the reader is a newcomer to Flaubert or a specialist. Arguing that Flaubert was imagining his own epoch through the eyes of a visionary saint in the fourth century AD, Orr elucidates the dialogues between religion and science that are the dynamic of the work for the first time. She also insists on the meticulous accuracy and imaginative representations of the science of the work, proposing - in the 'remapping' analogy of her subtitle - that Flaubert's Temptation is a paradigm of nineteenth-century French, and indeed European, 'literary science'. For nineteenth-century French and Flaubert specialists, this book then challenges received critical wisdom on a number of fronts. Through his unlikely protagonist-visionary, Flaubert's 'realism', 'anti-clericalism' and 'orientalism' are all given new airings in the religious and scientific evidence of the 1874 Temptation , as indeed in his 'temptation' to write the life of his times.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the idea of intertextuality and the debates surrounding it, focusing on the four key thinkers whose work has been central to these debates - Kristeva, Barthes, Bloom and Genette. A comprehensive introduction to 'intertextuality', a term which describes the idea that meaning only exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates. Focuses on the four key thinkers whose work has been central to these debates - Kristeva, Barthes, Bloom and Genette, guiding the reader through the original texts of each of these. Of special importance is the author’s reading (and translation) of other parts of Kristeva’s Semeiotiké. Takes a fresh approach to the rival French critics - Angenot, Derrida, Girard and Ricoeur - who also worked on intertexuality and tackles the 'language' of intertextuality, shining new light on some of the terminology most commonly associated with this concept.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the idea of intertextuality and the debates surrounding it, focusing on the four key thinkers whose work has been central to these debates - Kristeva, Barthes, Bloom and Genette. A comprehensive introduction to 'intertextuality', a term which describes the idea that meaning only exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates. Focuses on the four key thinkers whose work has been central to these debates - Kristeva, Barthes, Bloom and Genette, guiding the reader through the original texts of each of these. Of special importance is the author’s reading (and translation) of other parts of Kristeva’s Semeiotiké. Takes a fresh approach to the rival French critics - Angenot, Derrida, Girard and Ricoeur - who also worked on intertexuality and tackles the 'language' of intertextuality, shining new light on some of the terminology most commonly associated with this concept.

From Goethe to Gide brings together twelve essays on canonical male writers (six French and six German) commissioned from leading specialists from Britain and North America.These essays, aimed at final year undergraduates and postgraduates, focus on Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide. The collection therefore foregrounds the major authors taught on British university BA courses in French and German. Working with the tools of feminist criticism, the authors demonstrate how feminist readings of these writings can illuminate far more than attitudes towards women.

From Goethe to Gide brings together twelve essays on canonical male writers (six French and six German) commissioned from leading specialists from Britain and North America.These essays, aimed at final year undergraduates and postgraduates, focus on Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide. The collection therefore foregrounds the major authors taught on British university BA courses in French and German. Working with the tools of feminist criticism, the authors demonstrate how feminist readings of these writings can illuminate far more than attitudes towards women.

History from below uncovers overlooked protagonists contributing to (inter)national endeavour often against considerable odds. Mrs T. Edward Bowdich then Mrs R. Lee (1791–1856) is indicative. When women allegedly cannot participate in early nineteenth-century scientific exploration, discovery and publication, Sarah’s multiple specialist contributions to French and British natural history have attracted no book-length study. This first appraisal of Sarah’s unbroken production of discipline-changing scientific work over three decades – in modern ichthyology, in historical geography of West Africa and in the next-generational dissemination of expert scientific knowledge – does more than fill this gap. The book also pivotally investigates the intercultural, interdisciplinary and multi-genre reach of Sarah’s pioneering perspectives and contributions, and how she could achieve her work independently in her own name(s) over three decades. Sarah’s larger significance is then to provide a very different narrative for women at work in expert nineteenth-century natural history-making. By everywhere challenging the secondary, minor and domestic frames for women’s contributions of the period, the pioneering perspectives of Sarah’s story also provide alternative paradigms to the ‘leaky-pipeline’ modelstill informing women’s careers and work in STEM(M) today.

Inspired by the work of their colleague David Gascoigne, a group of scholars from the UK and France examine in this book the narrative strategies of some of the most interesting and important French writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stretching chronologically from 1905 to 2005, the volume examines a wide variety of prose genres, from pornography to Bildungsroman to magic realism, as well as poetry. Michel Tournier figures in several of the contributions, emerging as something of a touchstone for many of the thematic preoccupations that are common throughout the period: values and authority, self and other, identity, spirituality, migration and exile, sexuality, the body, violence and war, and language. The authors also examine the flourishing of intertextuality, as well as the use of traditional forms, such as mythical structures and the ‘robinsonade’, to undermine authoritative ‘métarécits’. Probing these themes and forms, and their metamorphoses across 100 years, the essays demonstrate a striking degree of continuity, linking writers as different as Apollinaire and Houellebecq or Valéry and Fleutiaux, and highlight the difficulty of dividing the period neatly into chronologically ordered categories labelled ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’.