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Nick Hewitt wrote wonderfully well about the significance of different places in French history and culture, and in our lives. Colette was a chronicler of places, from the famous childhood house and garden in Burgundy, to Brittany, Provence and of course Paris. But as her writing moves across regions and houses, home recurs as a crucial place in the emotional landscape of a human life. Nick was also always attentive to the relationship between canonical and 'minor' authors, and to the interplay between socio-political moment and cultural production. In this article home is examined as a vital and recurring theme not only in the work of Colette but also in that of her lesser-known female contemporaries – for home as a place has particular practical and emotional meanings for women.

The effects of reading on the reader have been remarkably little studied in literary criticism and theory. When, notably in the 1970s and 80s, reader-response theory brought the reader's role in the construction of a text's meaning to critical attention, that reader was largely deduced from the text itself and thus neither socially situated - in terms of class, ethnicity, degree of cultural capital - nor gendered. However feminist criticism, beginning in the 1970s though with significant antecedents, began from the premise that reading as well as writing mattered: that patriarchal culture was sustained and transmitted in part through its literature, which must be subjected to sceptical readings by women alert to the workings of masculinist ideology, while at the same time women's own writing should be rescued from critical deprecation and its contemporary practice promoted. The woman reader became one central focus of feminist literary study, with a particular emphasis on the genre that women have most extensively practised and read from the nineteenth century on, namely the novel. This article traces the history of feminist theorising of the effects on the reader of reading narrative fiction, with reference mainly to anglophone and francophone feminist criticism, arguably the most influential in a large and multi-lingual body of work. It illuminates the ways in which feminist literary theory has made the reader a significant agent in the way that a text produces meaning, and has replaced the abstract, singular reader of reader-response theory with a plurality of readers whose relationship to the text differs according to their sex (and, by implication, other elements of identity including ethnicity and class). By focusing on an interweaving chain of feminist writings, from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary work on the popular and middlebrow novel, this article shows how feminist critics have radically re-thought what it means to read a novel as a woman, and affirmed the political significance of reading. ; Los efectos de la lectura en el sujeto que lee han sido poco estudiados por la crítica y la teoría literarias. Cuando, concretamente en los años 1970 y 1980, la teoría de la recepción se interesó por el papel del lector en la construcción del sentido del texto, este se deducía principalmente del propio texto, como abstracción, y no estaba situado desde el punto de vista social –en términos de clase, raza o capital cultural– o de género. Sin embargo, la crítica feminista, a partir de 1970, aunque con antecedentes notables, partía de la premisa de que tanto la lectura como la escritura también debían ser objeto de análisis. En efecto, eran conscientes de que la cultura patriarcal se basaba y era transmitida en parte a través de la literatura. Por tanto, lo literario debía ser revisado críticamente por las mujeres, que tomarían así consciencia de la ideología masculinista. A su vez, la escritura de las mujeres debía no solo ser rescatada del desprecio crítico sino también promovida activamente. La figura de la lectora se convirtió así en uno de los objetos centrales de la teoría literaria feminista, con un interés especial en el género literario que las mujeres más habían producido y leído desde el siglo XIX, esto es, la novela. En el presente artículo, mi objetivo es trazar, al menos en líneas generales, la historia de las teorías feministas que se ocupan de los efectos de la lectura de novelas en la lectora, a partir de la crítica anglófona y francófona, por ser las más influyentes en un corpus amplio y multilingüe. El trabajo muestra así cómo la teoría literaria feminista ha convertido al sujeto que lee en un actor esencial en el proceso de creación de sentido y ha sustituido al lector abstracto y singular de la teoría de la recepción por una pluralidad de lectoras y lectores cuya relación con el texto varía en función de su sexo y, también, de otros elementos de su identidad como la raza y la clase social. A partir de una cadena de escritos feministas, desde Virginia Woolf y Simone de Beauvoir hasta trabajos recientes sobre la literatura popular y la novela middlebrow, este artículo muestra cómo las críticas feministas han logrado transformar radicalmente nuestra manera de entender la figura de la lectora, afirmando así el significado político de la lectura.

Part of the remit of French Cultural Studies is surely to study the 'littérature de grande consommation' largely ignored by more canonical critical approaches, especially in France, but vital to the shaping of ideas and values. This article explores the aesthetics and function of the middlebrow novel ( roman de mœurs, roman d'idées) at the belle époque, the period when technology and cross-class demand for entertaining and instructive fictions converged to produce a golden age of publishing. The main focus is on middle-class women as readers; contrary to modernist orthodoxy, I argue that the mainstream, formally conventional 'middlebrow' novel, at least in the hands of women authors, could perform a radicalising function, bringing 'new woman' plots into respectable drawing-rooms, offering pleasurably immersive stories that quietly confronted readers with the gap between Republican values and the reality of sexual inequality, and welcomed modernity as an age of potential for women.

In France 'immersive' storytelling in the novel has long been associated with lowbrow fiction, and critically disparaged in favour of more self-reflexive, experimental forms. Recently, however, not only have critical debates begun to question the equation of literary value with the text's 'intransitivity' (Barthes), but the massive success of certain contemporary novels has suggested a sharp divergence between critical orthodoxy and readers' literary values. Critics' responses to the runaway success of novels by Marc Levy, Anna Gavalda and others have hesitated between bemusement and contempt, while readers express the intense pleasure they find in these optimistic, absorbing stories. This article contends that the critically discredited art of mimetic (and, worse still, romantic) storytelling provides valuable pleasures, and that readers' responses deserve to be taken seriously. With the emphasis on novels by Levy and Gavalda, the article interrogates the relationship between literary and popular taste.

The 1950s and 1960s were a key moment in the development of postwar France. The period was one of rapid change, derived from post-World War II economic and social modernization; yet many traditional characteristics were retained. By analyzing the eruption of the new postwar world in the context of a France that was both modern and traditional, we can see how these worlds met and interacted, and how they set the scene for the turbulent 1960s and 70s. The examination of the development of mass culture in post-war France, undertaken in this volume, offers a valuable insight into the shifts that t

The Third Republic, known as the 'belle époque', was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these f

Machine generated contents note: pt. 1 Then: Second Wave Feminism in France -- 1.Before Les Femmes s'entetent: The `Bermuda Triangle' of French Feminism? / Sian Reynolds -- 2.1975: The Year of Women / Imogen Long -- 3.From Muse to Insoumuse: Delphine Seyrig, Videaste / Grace An -- pt. 2 Then and Now: Feminism and Public Arenas -- 4.Work-Family Reconciliation Policy in France: Challenging or Reinforcing the Gender Division of Domestic and Care Work since the 1970s? / Jan Windebank -- 5.Feminist Publishing in France 1975-2000: A Quest for Legitimacy / Fanny Mazzone -- 6.Parole(s) de Femmes: From Le Torchon brule to Les Nouvelles News / Maggie Allison -- 7.Utopian Gaiety: French Lesbian Activism and the Politics of Pleasure (1974-2016) / Tamara Chaplin -- 8.`La femme du soldat inconnu': Feminism and French lieux de memoire / Alison S. Fell --