ABSTRACT
French Dressing looks at the ancien régime's scenarios of libertine seduction--unsafe sex and its consequences for women's lives. It places the gender performances of male and female-authored novels in dialogue in order to recover the complexity of a century obsessed, as we are today, with writing and living plots of desire. French Dressing exposes the erotic anxieties behind a national culture of sexual self-display--French undressing.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|42 pages
Reading in Pairs
part 2|47 pages
Men's Reading, Women's Writing
chapter 4|11 pages
Cultural Memory and the Art of the Novel
Gender and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century France
part 3|54 pages
“I's” in Drag
part 4|55 pages
Exquisite Cadavers