Abstract
These epigraphs map out three intersecting dimensions of the central problem that this book seeks to address.1 Basing its approach on close readings of fictional figures of women poets within a specific corpus of thirteenth-through fifteenth-century French works, it aims to rethink portrayals of literary creation, as performed by gendered bodies, within a cultural context in which individual authorship remains a problematic concept. This is not a study of author figures; it is a study of some of the figures who appear in what Foucault calls the “gaps,” “breaches,” and “openings that [the author’s] disappearance uncovers.”
Keywords
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The author is not a medieval concept.
Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant
What does it mean to read (for) the woman writer when the Author is Dead?
Nancy K. Miller, “Changing the Subject”
It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. […] Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
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Notes
Epigraphs from Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 8.
Nancy Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 107.
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© 2012 Brooke Heidenreich Findley
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Findley, B.H. (2012). Introduction Authors, Writers, Singers, and Women: Gendering Literary Creation in Medieval French Culture. In: Poet Heroines in Medieval French Narrative. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137113061_1
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