Bernadette Fort

Framing the wife: Jean-Baptiste Greuze's sexual contract

With contributions of scholars from Europe and North America, this book covers the representation of women in word and image in the context of changing frames of mentalities in two distinct periods - the Enlightenment and postmodernism. Subjects and artists/authors covered include prostitution, English and French art (Hogarth, Reynolds, Beardsley, Greuze), postmodern feminist theatre, recent fiction by Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood and Spanish literature. Special chapters deal with the construction of women in recent popular animated cartoons and computer games.

Voice of the Public: The Carnivalization of Salon Art in Prerevolutionary Pamphlets

ONE OF THE PRODUCTIVE APPROACHES explored recently by historians to account for the momentous upheaval of 1789 has been the analysis of the creation and expansion of public opinion as a rival concept and a competing force to royal authority in pre-revolutionary decades. While the emergence of le public and public opinion as ideological constructs, and their theoretical discussion, have been traced back to Rousseaus 1750 Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts and through the writings of Malesherbes, Condorcet, Turgot, Mercier, and a number of other writers and politicians, other studies have followed the instanciation of public opinion in various oppositional writings, from the pamphlets supporting the Jansenist party and the parlementaires in the 1750s to the outpouring of violent libels surrounding all the great crises of the declining monarchy in the 1780s.1 That art criticism was an important channel of public opinion,