Colette

This concise study offers a feminist re-reading of Colette's prolific and varied writing. The approach emphasises both contextualisation and close textual analysis: examining the ideological context of Colette's education, situating her earliest novels in relation to the writing of women contemporaries, reading the journalism and the fiction in terms of social and economic realism - and also studying the texts' subversive interrogation of gender as a question of narrative and linguistic technique. Colette emerges as a richly, radically feminist writer. Colette has long been acknowledged as one of the great French stylists of the 20th century, but the majority of male critics have qualified their praise by lamenting the triviality of her themes and the insignificance of her heroes. Over the past two decades, mostly in France and the U.S.A., feminist re-readings have begun to appear which demonstrate that Colette's work in fact deals radically with issues such as female sexuality, domestic life and the struggle to earn a living in a man's world Front Matter....Pages i-viii The Hidden Woman: An Introduction....Pages 1-7 Creative Contradictions....Pages 8-24 Claudine in Context....Pages 25-48 In the Crowd: Writing and the Social Order....Pages 49-69 The Body in the Text....Pages 70-91 Green Sealing Wax: Language, Style and Gender....Pages 92-111 Break of Day and The Evening Star....Pages 112-130 Back Matter....Pages 131-142 Colette's work is examined from social and economic, linguistic and sexual perspectives. In addition her early work is compared to that of her female contemporaries. Holmes argues that her texts stand out as expressions of a feminist philosophy which challenges the barriers between the genders. Diana Holmes. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 135-139.