Whitney Walton

Arvède Barine: History, Modernity, and Feminism

Arvede Barine, pseudonym of Louise-Cecile Vincens (1840–1908), is hardly known today, but her histories, biographies, and literary criticism were immensely popular in France, Europe, and North America during her lifetime. This essay links Barine’s historical practices to her ambivalent relationship to feminism and modernity, based on her published works and the extensive correspondence addressed to Barine held in the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France in Paris. While she explicitly rejected feminist claims for legal equality with men, she was very much interested in ways that women in the past exerted influence and conducted their lives. This chapter contends that this ambiguity lies in the three different levels of analysis Barine applied to her subjects: inherited traits, social and cultural history, and individual choices.

National interests and cultural exchange in French and American educational travel, 1914–1970

In contrast to much recent scholarship focusing on the intent of the USA to exercise ‘informal American empire’ through student exchanges, this study analyses both intentions and outcomes in educational exchanges between France and the USA from 1914 to 1970. Archival research, oral interviews, and published works in both countries reveal that study abroad served national interests because American students became advocates for France as well as thoughtful nationalists by experiencing a transformative cultural exchange through learning and living in France. Thus, study abroad served both national interests and internationalism.

Eve's Proud Descendants. Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France

1. Introduction 2. Growing up female in postrevolutionary France 3. The erotics of writing: affective life, literary beginnings and pseudonyms 4. Cassandra, Diotima, Aspasia, and Cleopatra: challenging the bluestocking stereotype in literary culture 5. Women writers as republicans in July monarchy political culture 6. Republican women and republican families 7. Writing and rewriting the revolution of 1848 8. Conclusion Notes Selected bibliography Index.