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

这本书对传统政治提出了质疑，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：朱利亚·比戈利纳（Giulia Bigolina）、莫德纳·冯特·玛丽·沃斯（Moderata Fonte Mary Wroth）、玛丽亚·德·扎亚斯（Maria de Zayas）和玛德琳·德·斯库德萨梅里（Madeleine de scud<s:1> ry）。尽管这四个人都引起了男性的钦佩，但他们才刚刚开始从两个多世纪以来被历史编纂传统赋予的默默无闻中重新出现。具有讽刺意味的是，首先将这些女作家联系在一起的部分事实是，她们没有选择虔诚的写作，而是选择了一种传统上因其“女性气质”而被谴责为不值得和道德败坏的浪漫题材，从而走出了唯一被认为可以接受女性扮演的作家角色。尽管这些作家的作品在风格上与其内在的特殊性存在差异，但在意识形态上将他们联系起来的是他们对女性的表现。这些反过来又告诉我们，这些女性作家在早期现代欧洲更广泛的背景下，对主流文化价值观的内化——也就是我们可以称之为“平行心态”的背景下，在长达几个世纪的关于女性在社会中的适当地位和文化接触的“女性问题”（Querelle des femmes）辩论中得到了体现。本书首先关注的是比戈利纳、丰特、沃斯、斯库达姆斯和扎亚斯的文本中对女性身体的描绘，以及这些女性作家对盛行的父权制意识形态的回应方式，这种意识形态反映了现代早期支配女性形象的各种矛盾心理。特别是，这本书揭示了这些女性作家是如何通过视觉艺术和各种文学体裁(从彼特拉克诗歌、史诗和田园浪漫小说到非文学体裁（如礼仪书、反对和为“女性”道歉的小册子），以一些挑衅的方式扭曲女性的经典形象的。然后，争论转向分析女性在这些文本虚构的父权社会的私人和公共领域的声音和表演。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女性角色的表演，但这些女性作品中一个特别创新的方面是她们对厌恶女性的作品的回应，因此她们经常作为公正的女性历史学家和女性接触文化的坚定捍卫者出现，并将她们的文本转变为女性的“记忆场所”，“代替msammoire”。特别是，我认为沙龙文化的各种表现形式在何种程度上使这些女性作家沉浸其中，使她们能够在自己的小说中表达一种反话语。由于一个深远的传统，将景观作为女性的所在地，在这些女性文本中发现的许多以女性为中心的空间作为社交聚会的背景，在社交聚会中，女性被描绘成文化代理人。正如我在这本书中所说的，这种反话语和将文本转化为女性的“记忆场所”，在这些女性作家对女性文学创造力的文本和空间表现中达到了顶峰。她们对文学女性的多元积极的创新表现，无疑对女性读者的塑造和女性主义意识的形成起到了重要的作用。由于缺乏记录，确定早期现代作品的文化影响往往是一项任务，这些作品被写在正典之外。然而，这一点也几乎没有加以探讨，主要是因为大部分主要资料来源和它们的相对难以获得性使这一任务几乎不可能实现。在接受这一挑战的过程中，我的书揭示了早期现代女性作家在女性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.