Melanie Hawthorne - Böcker

These essays address the multitude of issues arising from the affective, personal, political and sexual dimensions of Simone de Beauvoir's work. Contributors include Serge Julienne-Caffie, Asa Momberg, Barbara Klaw, Richard J. Golsan and Liz Constable.

As the existentialist philosophers of mid-twentieth-century Paris famously asserted, a life can only be assessed fully after it has ended. Fitting, then, that since her death in 1986, the philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir has been the subject of numerous attempts to evaluate her contributions to intellectual thought. With the uncovering of her early diaries and the recent publication of her passionate letters to Nelson Algren, she has become more than a towering figure of twentieth-century feminism. She is at once an intensely human figure and a fertile field for application of various sexual constructs and for argument over feminist principles.Edited by Melanie C. Hawthorne, this volume brings into play a variety of fresh voices, from a Swedish novelist and advice columnist to an interdisciplinary theorist of decadence. The essays address the multitude of issues arising from the affective, personal, political, and sexual dimensions of Beauvoir's life and work. Fifty years after the publication of The Second Sex, Contingent Loves offers a wide-ranging discussion of the immeasurable impact Simone de Beauvoir has had on feminist discourse.

In this key text from the French decadent movement, an aristocratic young woman becomes enamored of a young man who makes artificial flowers for a living.

When the rich and well-connected Raoule de Vénérande becomes enamoured of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule’s suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.A writer and cultural arbiter of a salon in France from the early 1880s until 1930, Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery) won celebrity with this scandalously decadent novel. An inversion of the Pygmalion story, the book was judged to be pornographic, and a Belgian court sentenced its author (in absentia) to two years in prison. Verlaine congratulated Rachilde on the invention of a new vice.

A collection of short stories by Renée Vivien (1877-1909). Reflects and challenges attitudes of the belle epoque, questions gender roles, and represents same-sex love and desire. Stories feature unreliable narrators and include rewritten fairy tales and ancient myths, adventure stories in the American West and at sea, and others.