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Conroy, Derval
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Conroy, Derval
Official Name
Conroy, Derval
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- PublicationDes noeuds que l'amour ne rompt point'? Sisters and friendship in seventeenth-century French tragedy and tragi-comedyThis article grew out of a desire to investigate the commonly held theory that female friendship is under-represented in literature. Notwithstanding recent research (chiefly on nineteenth and twentieth century English-language fiction) which has nuanced Virginia Woolf’s famous lamentation of the absence of literary representations of female friends,1 the idea that female friendship is a rare literary phenomenon appears to persist.2 My theory was that its would-be rarity was due in no small part to the rarity of research concerning it: were we just not looking? More specifically, my interest lay in the representation of blood sisters, having come to this subject through the work of seventeenth-century female dramatist Catherine Bernard, and the representation of the sisters in Laodamie. Despite growing interest in familial relations in the early modern period, it remains a relatively unexplored area: to the best of my knowledge, no historical or literary study of early modern (blood) sisters has appeared to date.3 Now, if female friendship has been dismembered as Janice Raymond maintains,4 it is clear that blood sisters have been given even worse press. Despite the fact that the blood sister relationship has provided the model for non-kinship bonds of mutual affection and / or solidarity between women (in the commonly evoked notion of sisterhood),5 the dominant image of sisters in the myths and fairytales of Western literature (such as Cinderella or Psyché) is one of jealous arch-rivals, often with homicidal tendencies. Discounting comedies, my quest led me to eighteen plays (eight tragedies and ten tragi-comedies), where the relationship between the sisters varies on the one hand from bitter jealousy (usually experienced by one sister, to the blithe ignorance of the other) to, on the other hand, selfless devotion, where one sister would sacrifice her life for the other. Leaving the more common representation of sisters as jealous rivals aside – the ‘simplified, conventionalised’ representations of female relationships which Woolf bemoaned6 – the aim of this article is to examine a number of other models of sisterhood and of female friendship with which the dramatists provide us, and hence to analyse how sisterhood is configured in this element of early modern literature.
181 - PublicationA Defence and Illustration of Marie de Gournay: Bayle’s Reception of ‘Cette Savante Demoiselle’The assassination of Henri IV by François Ravaillacin 1610 sparked an immediate pamphlet polemic regarding the Jesuits and their position in France. First in the fray was the Lettre déclamatoire by the assassinated king’s Jesuit confessor Pierre Coton, which triggered the anti-Jesuit satire L’Anti-Coton. Amongst other replies, Marie de Gournay’s pro-Jesuit text Adieu de l’ame du roy de France et de Navarre Henry le Grand à la Royne, avec la Defence des Peres Jesuistes appeared at this point, shortly followed by Le Remerciment des Beurrières de Paris, the latter of which treats of Gournay as a public woman.
188 - PublicationThe displacement of disorder: gynæcocracy and friendship in Catherine Bernard’s Laodamie (1689)It should come as no surprise that the world of Catherine Bernard’s tragedies is one of disorder: theatre is after all, as d’Aubignac tells us, ‘[là ] où règne le Démon de l’inquiétude, du trouble et du désordre’. Disorder is a characteristic of the genre; it is a state of affairs rectified by the dénouement , ensuring that the spectators depart, in the words of Corneille, ‘l’esprit en repos’. Bernard’s play Lao damie might appear at first glance, within the framework of a traditional patriarchal paradigm, to provide the perfect recipe for disorder: firstly the sovereign ruler is a woman, and secondly both she and her sister are in love with the same man. However, it soon becomes apparent that the focus of that disorder is displaced away from where we might expect to see it. The aim of this article is to analyse this displacement of disorder as it manifests itself in the inextricably linked public and private spher es. Such an analysis will enable us to evaluate the innovations central to this neglected, once highly successful, tragedy.
356 - PublicationDes livres d’entrées? Vers une poétique de récit de voyage dans les relations d’entrées de Puget de la SerreDans les pages qui suivent, nous aimerions démontrer que les récits peu étudiés de La Serre se situent à un carrefour de genres entre le récit de voyage et la relation d’entrée. Loin de n’être « guère passionants », ils constituent, au contraire, un exemple fort intéressant de la nature polymorphe des récits de voyage à l’époque et illustrent la façon dont La Serre s’approprie divers discours pour glorifier la reine. Cet article ne vise pas à faire une analyse historique des entrées de Marie de Médicis, ni à analyser le décalage entre la version de La Serre et la ‘réalité’ des événements (dans la mesure où nous ne pouvons parler d’une seule ‘réalité’ à propos d’ un cérémonial aussi construit qu’une entrée royale peut l’être). L’approche adoptée est essentiellement littéraire : nous aimerions étudier comment plusieurs éléments communs aux trois textes de La Serre – certains assez typiques des livres d’entrées, d’au tres plutôt étrangers au genre – peuvent être perçus comme les traits d’une poétique du récit de voyage. C’est dans cette optique que nous espérons apporter une contribution nouvelle aux travaux de plus en plus nombreux sur les entrées royales
231 - PublicationAppropriations of a political machine: Translations of Pierre Le Moyne's Gallerie des femmes fortes (1647)This article examines the published translations into Italian (1701) and Spanish (1702) of Pierre Le Moyne's Gallerie des femmes fortes (1647). Through an analysis of a number of peritexts, rather than the text itself, it aims to examine how Le Moyne's Gallerie, a volume fundamentally rooted in the political, ideological and aesthetic climate of 1647 France, was appropriated in other socio-cultural and political climates. Freed from its original moment of creation and, to a lesser degree, from its creator, the book becomes a changing entity to be shaped at will by a new creator or creators, within a new set of sociocultural parameters. Analysis of the prologues, in particular, of translators Laura Maria Foschiera and Fernando Bravo de Lagunas y Bedoya, throws light on their respective socio-cultural contexts and intended readerships, and highlights the importance of peritexts in shaping the book-as-object and its reception. Of particular interest is the Lima translation (1702) largely believed to have been lost up until now.
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