{"title":"Antoinette Deshoulières’s Cat","authors":"Helena Taylor","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9377358","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n This article examines the poet Antoinette Deshoulières’s (1638–94) interventions in a number of querelles. It focuses on a series of poems that appeared in 1678–79, early in her career, and written as if from her pet cat. Often dismissed for their frivolity, these poems instead reveal Deshoulières’s engagement with the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns and the debates about the animal machine. While such interventions constituted an important strategy for making a name for herself, they are characterized by elusiveness. Although that elusiveness has been read as a gendered strategy of modesty, this article shows instead that her equivocal and even parodic, burlesque way of intervening in the two quarrels is consistent with her skepticism and presents readers with a hermeneutical challenge that disrupts the rhetorical logic of a quarrel. Deshoulières’s interventions invite us to reflect on the roles of gender, genre, and interpretation in early modern quarrels and their study.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Romanic Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9377358","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, ROMANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article examines the poet Antoinette Deshoulières’s (1638–94) interventions in a number of querelles. It focuses on a series of poems that appeared in 1678–79, early in her career, and written as if from her pet cat. Often dismissed for their frivolity, these poems instead reveal Deshoulières’s engagement with the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns and the debates about the animal machine. While such interventions constituted an important strategy for making a name for herself, they are characterized by elusiveness. Although that elusiveness has been read as a gendered strategy of modesty, this article shows instead that her equivocal and even parodic, burlesque way of intervening in the two quarrels is consistent with her skepticism and presents readers with a hermeneutical challenge that disrupts the rhetorical logic of a quarrel. Deshoulières’s interventions invite us to reflect on the roles of gender, genre, and interpretation in early modern quarrels and their study.
Romanic ReviewArts and Humanities-Arts and Humanities (all)
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
23
期刊介绍:
The Romanic Review is a journal devoted to the study of Romance literatures.Founded by Henry Alfred Todd in 1910, it is published by the Department of French and Romance Philology of Columbia University in cooperation with the Departments of Spanish and Italian. The journal is published four times a year (January, March, May, November) and balances special thematic issues and regular unsolicited issues. It covers all periods of French, Italian and Spanish-language literature, and welcomes a broad diversity of critical approaches.