Preface

Abstract

Preface Juliette M. Rogers With this, the twenty-third volume of Women in French Studies, I am very honored and proud to start my term as Editor in Chief and to continue the tradition of providing top-notch research on French and francophone women to our members and to researchers worldwide. I would like to begin my first “Editor’s Preface” by thanking the hard work and incredible talent of my predecessors who worked as editor for this journal, including Annabelle Rea, Colette Trout, Adèle King, Frédérique Chevillot, Catherine Montfort, and, of course, our most recent editor, Dawn Cornelio. Dawn not only edited six annual volumes of Women in French Studies, but also just finished co-editing the volume of essays from our 2014 Women in French conference, held at her beautiful campus, the Université de Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her vast knowledge, wise counsel, and great attention to detail have made my transition this year so much easier, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart for all she has done to answer my questions over the past year. Merci mille fois, Dawn. I also give many thanks to our new Production Editor, Marijn S. Kaplan, for her fantastic formatting, proof reading, and editorial work that she has done for this volume; without her skills and effort, you would not be reading this text. And finally, I thank all the members of the Editorial Board who agreed to read and evaluate manuscripts this year, as well as experts from around the globe who often served as second readers for each article. Scholars from North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia provided detailed suggestions and comments that helped to form the articles that you will read here, and I am most grateful for their time and their expertise. As in past volumes, you will find enclosed between the covers of this latest tome a great variety of research, arranged in chronological order, as is our practice in our regular annual volumes. We begin in the nineteenth century with one of the most read and one of the least read works in French literary studies: Briana Lewis’s study of three women protagonists in Hugo’s Les Misérables and Daniel Hanna’s examination of the writings of a cloistered nun, Marie Aimée de Jésus, who spent much of her life writing against Ernest Renan’s 1863 publication Vie de Jésus. The articles then shift to the middle of the twentieth century, with Aubrey Jones Kubiak’s new approach to the classic Québécois text Bonheur d’occasion published in 1947 by Gabrielle Roy, and Kathleen Antonioli’s rereading of Le Deuxième sexe for a fresh interpretation of how de Beauvoir handled women writers. The last four articles discuss writers from the [End Page 8] 1980s to the present, beginning with Holly Collins’s article on three of Maryse Condé’s novels and their creolization of earlier stories, and Mercédès Baillargeon’s text that studies Christine Angot’s self-referential works on incest and how they and she have been received. Hanétha Vété-Congolo’s article on Fabienne Kanor’s 2004 novel D’eaux douces explores the influence of Paulette Nardal and Douboutisme on the construction of identity and the dynamics of the Martinican couple, and Laura Loth’s study of Yanick Lahens’s 2010 and 2013 works offers us an innovative way to reconcile this Haitian author’s pre- and post-earthquake approaches to writing. We round up this fine group of texts with an extensive and inspiring interview from 2013 by Thérèse De Raedt with Bestine Kazadi Ditabala, a lawyer, poet and activist for the women of the Democratic Republic of Congo whose collection of poems Infi(r)niment femme has just been republished by l’Harmattan press this year. We also have three book reviews to finish the volume. As you can see, our organization is tremendously fortunate to have members whose scholarship ranges so widely both in time and in geographic origin. I hope that in future volumes we will continue to expand those parameters, with articles on even earlier...