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WORLEY Sharon, Women's Literary Salons and Political Propaganda During the Napoleonic Era: The Cradle of Patriotic Nationalism
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© Edwin Mellen Press Ltd
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Description:
From the publishers:
In 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte sought to impose an absolute political authority as First Consul for life, and emperor in 1804. A network of women authors connected with Germaine de Stael in Paris, Coppet, Berlin, and Florence maintained salons and addressed political conflicts in their novels, correspondence and theory. Nationalist histories, written by salon members, reinforced their unified political agenda by emphasizing the heroic acts that guaranteed national freedom. Semiotics became the primary means of political propaganda and persuasion in the absence of legislative debate and women's suffrage. As Napoleon expanded the boundaries of his empire throughout Europe, Neoclassicism became the dominant mode of imperial design expressed through Roman imperial motifs in monuments he erected throughout Paris. Romanticism, by contrast was favored by the resistance movement in women's literary salons. Faced with an enforced political impotence imposed by society, women turned to literature as a political tool in fomenting political propaganda movements. Women's literary salons that once entertained Republican political circles at the time of the French Revolution, continued to promote republican or monarchist values as anti-Napoleonic centers from Paris to Florence. The salons reflected their hostesses' political agenda to overthrow a patriarchal tyrannical order that had displaced the former Republican value of social equality or monarchist values of self-rule and nationalism. The issue of womens' citizenship and social equality was overturned during the early Republic, and precluded again by the imperial Napoleonic regime. Thus, women's novels, correspondence, and dramas represented an alternative to direct political participation by presenting moral and patriotic role models designed to instill republican or monarchist values in their audience through contemporary theories of epistemology.
Place and publisher: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd
Date of publication: 2009
Number of pages: 556
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This week’s book(s):
Description: From the publishers:
In The Barbed Crown, the sixth tale of rogue and adventurer Ethan Gage by William Dietrich, our hero returns to Paris and London. Against a background of imperial pomp and the gathering clouds of war, Gage plots revenge on Napoleon Bonaparte for the kidnap of his son. Paris, the “City of Lights,” shines – but alongside its splendor is great squalor. Heroic patriotism rubs against mean ambition, while grand strategy and back-alley conspiracy are never far apart. While Ethan spies on the French court, his wife, Astiza, works to sabotage Napoleon's coronation using the Crown of Thorns, a legendary relic said to have come from the Crucifixion itself. But when Napoleon is crowned nonetheless, they flee to England.
At Walmer Castle on the English coast, Gage joins a daring campaign by Smith, Fulton, rocket inventor William Congreve and smuggler Tom Johnstone to halt Napoleon's intended invasion of England – a campaign which leads Ethan to take a role in the Battle of Trafalgar itself...
Place and publisher: Harper
Date of publication: 2013
Number of pages: 373
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