Women's spaces, bodies and voices: a cross-cultural study of female-authored fiction in early modern Europe (1500-1700)

这本书反对传统的政治，重点介绍了来自意大利、英国、西班牙和法国的五位女作家的作品：朱莉娅·比戈琳娜、莫迪拉塔·方特·玛丽·沃思、玛丽亚·德·扎亚斯和马德琳·德·斯库德里。尽管这四本书都引起了男性的钦佩，但她们才刚刚开始从两个多世纪以来史学传统赋予她们的默默无闻中恢复过来。具有讽刺意味的是，这些女性作家最初的联系部分是这样一个事实，即她们走出了被认为是女性可以扮演的唯一作者角色，没有选择虔诚的写作，而是一种体裁，即传统上被谴责为不值得和道德败坏的浪漫小说，因为它的女性气质。尽管这些作家的作品与他们内在的特殊性在文体上存在差异，但在意识形态上将他们联系在一起的是他们对女性的表现。这些反过来又让我们了解到，这些女作家在早期现代欧洲更广泛的背景下内化了主导的文化价值观--也就是我们可以在被我们称为“平行心态”的背景下，概括为关于女性在社会中的适当位置和接触文化的长达几个世纪的辩论。这本书首先关注了比戈琳娜、方特、弗罗斯、飞毛腿和扎亚的文本中女性身体的表现，以及这些女性作家对盛行的三级制意识形态的反应，这种意识形态反映了支配早期现代女性形象的矛盾心理的各种表现。特别是，这本书揭示了这些女性作家如何通过视觉艺术和各种文学体裁(从彼得拉克诗歌、史诗和田园浪漫到非文学体裁)对女性的经典形象进行了一些挑衅的扭曲处理(如礼仪书籍、反对和道歉的小册子)。然后，论证转向分析女性在这些文本虚构的父权社会中的私人和公共领域的声音和表现。虽然这些(非)赋予权力的表演可能会让人想起早期现代戏剧中的女性角色，但这些女性作品中一个特别创新的方面是她们对歧视女性的作品的反应，在这些作品中，她们往往成为不偏不倚的女性史学家和女性接触文化的坚定捍卫者，并将她们的文本转变为女性的“记忆场所”，即“替代梦境”。特别是，我认为这些女作家沉浸在沙龙文化中的各种表现形式在多大程度上使她们能够在自己的小说中清楚地表达出一种反话语。由于一个以风景为女性中心的深远传统，这些女性文本中的许多女性中心空间充当了社交聚会的背景，在这些社交聚会中，女性被描绘成文化代理人。正如我在这本书中所论证的那样，这种对文本的反话语和对女性的“场所记忆”的转变，最终导致了这些女作家对女性文学创造力的文本和空间表现。她们对女性文人的多重积极的创新表现，无疑对她们女性读者身份的形成和女性主义意识的形成起到了重要作用。由于缺乏记录，鉴定早期现代作品的文化影响往往成为一项任务，这些作品已经被写出了正典。然而，这一点也几乎没有得到探索，主要是因为大部分初级来源及其相对不可及的可能性使得这项任务几乎无法实现。在接受这一挑战的过程中，我的书揭示了早期现代女作家在为女性创造文化记忆方面的作用，同时解决了她们女权主义议程的局限性。

Taking issue with the politics of tradition, the book focuses on the works by five women writers from Italy, England, Spain and France: Giulia Bigolina, Moderata Fonte Mary Wroth, Maria de Zayas and Madeleine de Scudéry. Although all four elicited male admiration, they have only begun to re-emerge from the obscurity to which a tradition of historiography has consigned them for more than two centuries. Ironically, what first links these women writers is partly the fact that they stepped out of the only authorial part deemed to be acceptable for a woman to play, by not choosing devotional writing, but instead a genre, the romance, traditionally decried as unworthy and morally corrupting by virtue of its 'femininity'. Despite the stylistic discrepancy between these authors' works and their intrinsic specificities, what ideologically links them is their representations of women. These in turn inform us about these women writers' internalisation of dominant cultural values in the broader context of early modern Europe - that is in the context of what we could call 'parallel mentalities', encapsulated in the centuries-long debates of the 'Querelle des femmes', with regard to woman's appropriate place in society and access to culture. The book first focuses on the representation of women's bodies in Bigolina's, Fonte's, Wroth's, Scudéry's and Zayas's texts, and the ways in which these women writers respond to the prevailingly partriarchal ideology that informs the various manifestations of ambivalence that govern the mapping of womanhood in the early modern period. In particular, the book uncovers the ways in which these women writers manipulate with some defiant twist the canonic images of women that were available to them through the visual arts and the various literary genres from Petrarchan poetry, epic and pastoral romances to non-literary genres (such as courtesy books; pamphlets against, and apologies for, the 'fair sex'). The argumentation then shifts to the analysis of women's voices and performances in the private and public spheres of these texts' fictional patriarchal societies. While these (dis)empowering performances may recall those of female personae in early modern theatre, one particularly innovative aspect in these women's works is their responses to misogynistic writings, whereby they often emerge as the unbiased historiographers of women and assertive defenders of women's access to culture, and transform their texts into a 'locus memoriae', 'lieu de mémoire' for women. In particular, I consider the extent to which the various manifestations of salon culture in which these women writers were immersed enabled them to articulate a counter-discourse in their own fiction. Owing debt to a far-reaching tradition that uses landscape as the locus of the feminine, many of the feminocentric spaces found in these women's texts serve as a backdrop for social gatherings in which women are portrayed as cultural agents. As I argue in this book, this counter-discourse and transformation of the text into a 'locus memoriae' for women culminate in these women writers' textual and spatial representations of female literary creativity. Their innovative multiple positive representations of the woman of letters, undoubtedly played an important role in the fashioning of their female readerships and in the formation of a feminist consciousness. Lack of records often make the task of identifying the cultural impact of early modern works which have been written out of the canon. Nevertheless, this has also been hardly explored, mainly because the bulk of the primary sources and their relative inacessibility have made it an almost impossible task to achieve. In taking up this challenge, my book sheds light on early modern women writers' agency in the creation of a cultural memory for women by women, while addressing the limits of their feminist agendas.