Vicki Mistacco – författare

In this first book­length study of prolific polymath Louise de Keralio (1756–1822), Vicki Mistacco offers a comprehensive reading of her entire body of writing and a new understanding of Keralio as an Enlightenment intellectual and a modern feminist thinker. Mistacco adopts a fresh approach to Keralio's published and unpublished writing, undertaking close textual analysis informed by feminist literary criticism and French feminist theory, and carefully reconstructing the historical and cultural context, in order to challenge the critical commonplace that Keralio is a puzzling "sexist republican." She cautions against a piecemeal approach focused almost exclusively on Keralio's writings during the French Revolution. Reading literarily rather than literally, she argues against imposing modern definitions of feminist activism on Keralio and for considering instead the anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-exclusionary paradigm at the core of her thinking, a both/and rather than either/or paradigm, which Keralio comes to envisage as a maternal one, reflected in the recurring motif of crossing boundaries. Through sustained analysis of works that have hitherto received only scant attention, Keralio's translations of John Carr's travelogues and her late novels (1808–1810), Mistacco sheds light on Keralio's use of "double-voiced discourse" to uphold her feminist ideals while ostensibly endorsing gender norms. The three parts of the book, "Women's Writing: Negotiating a Space," "Philosophizing in the Margins," and "The Missing Mother," trace the evolution in Keralio's thinking about the importance of including a matrimoine or maternal legacy in cultural patrimony, whether it be the contributions of French women writers to national identity and French genius (Collection des meilleurs ouvrages français composés par des femmes), or those of Queen Elizabeth to the history of European sovereignty (Histoire d'Élisabeth, reine d'Angleterre), or her own annotations to her translations, or in her late novels the testimony of women to arrive at historical truth. Mistacco shows how the idea of maternal legacy evolves into that of maternal Enlightenment, arguing that Keralio elevates the maternal to the level of philosophy and theorizes a new social contract based on an ethics of care. Including unpublished and archival texts, this book offers an important contribution to the history of women intellectuals of the Enlightenment.

Les femmes et la tradition littéraire, a two-part anthology, offers a sweeping historical overview of women’s literature in France from the twelfth century to the present. Generously illustrated and richly annotated, it presents writers such as Hélisenne de Crenne, Gabrielle de Villeneuve, Louise Ackermann and Renée Vivien along with more familiar figures including Labé, Lafayette, Sand, Beauvoir, Colette and Duras. In addition to novels, short stories and poetry, it features fairy tales, sentimental and philosophical letters, feminist political and literary manifestos and some medieval and Renaissance selections appearing for the first time in modern French.Les femmes et la tradition littéraire, anthologie en deux parties, offre un vaste tableau historique de la littérature féminine en France du XIIe siècle à nos jours. Enrichie de nombreuses illustrations et de commentaires critiques, elle présente des écrivaines telles que Hélisenne de Crenne, Gabrielle de Villeneuve, Louise Ackermann et Renée Vivien aussi bien que des auteurs plus connues comme Labé, Lafayette, Sand, Beauvoir, Colette et Duras. Outre des extraits de romans, des nouvelles et des poèmes, elle comprend des contes de fées, des lettres sentimentales et philosophiques, des manifestes politiques et littéraires et des textes du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance paraissant pour la première fois en français moderne.