“The Past Is an Appeal”

Abstract

As the International Simone de Beauvoir Society celebrates the relaunch of Simone de Beauvoir Studies, the author looks back with gratitude to longtime editor Yolanda Patterson and reviews what the journal’s thirty-year history has to tell us about Beauvoir scholarship, past, present, and future. Topics discussed include the history of the Society; engagements with Beauvoir from the perspectives of literary criticism, philosophy, and the social sciences; and controversies over Beauvoir’s character, her response to the Occupation, her relationship to Sartre, and her legacy for feminism.