New Pleasure in Life Unfolding
Madeleine de Scudéry’s Friendship Fan
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9310105 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura J Burch (College of Wooster, corresponding author), Laura Burch |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 4-17 |
| Publication date | 2014-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Seventeenth-Century French Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0265-1068 • E-ISSN: 1752-2692 |
| Publisher | Maney Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1179/0265106814z.00000000035 |
| OpenAlex | W2055739169 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
During her long literary career, Madeleine de Scudéry developed complex representations of mixed-gender friendship. However, the fullest expression of this heterosocial paradigm can be found not in the novels for which she remains most well-known, but in the Conversations, her final published literary output. This article analyzes the description of a particular object, a lady’s fan, found in the Conversations’ chapter on friendship (1686). When we see the fan in both its historical and literary context, we see that the Conversations are also quite possibly the chef d’oeuvre of Scudéry’s literary career, the point at which, for the first time, her life-long concerns about the power of women to participate in the sociable world of the seventeenth-century letters unfold from within the frame of philia rather than of eros. The ‘friendship’ fan diverts readerly attention from Scudéry’s novels as it gestures toward a new, self-sustaining and self-renewing form of mixed-gender sociability. Through it, Scudéry artfully fashions a ‘new’ and ‘pleasing’ life in and of words for seventeenth-century women
Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Friendship · Gesture · Linguistics · Literature · Pleasure · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |