Joan E. DeJean

Professor Joan Dejean

An exploration of how French culture during the reign of Louis XIV has had an enduring influence on modern traditions and style cites the French origins of haute cuisine, interior design, and the consumption of celebratory champagne.

How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour

The Essence of Style

Tender Geographies offers a new version of literary history by arguing that French women writers were the originators of the modern novel. Joan DeJean exposes the gender politics of canon formation in France.During what is considered the Great Century of French Letters (1630-1715), women writers were active in numbers unheard of before or since. Featuring the best known early women novelists--ScudA(c)ry and Lafayette-- Tender Geographies repositions literary women in their contemporary context. DeJean demonstrates that women's writing was widely thought to convey a politically and socially subversive vision. Originally considered a threat to Church and State, women's novels were deliberately represented as innocent love stories by the first official literary historians and subsequently consigned to oblivion. DeJean demonstrates that the novel owes its origins to a thoroughly political act; the decision by women to make the genre a revolutionary force.

Joan E. DeJean

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