Belle Époque Novels of Professional Development
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Rogers, Juliette M.
- Publish Year
- 2007
- Shelfmark
- FR 54 2007
- Thesaurus
- romans, loopbanen, interbellum, 19e eeuw, 20e eeuw
- Description
- In this book Juliette Rogers considers a body of novels from the Belle Epoque that defy the usual categories allowed the female protagonist of the period. While most literary studies of the Belle Epoque (1880-1914) focus on the conventional housewife or harlot distinction for female protagonists, the heroines investigated in this book are professional lawyers, doctors, teachers, writers, archeologists, and scientists.This book seeks to understand early twentieth-century France by examining novels written about professional women, bourgeois and working-class heroines, and the particular dilemmas that they faced. It contributes a new facet to literary histories of the Belle Epoque: a subgenre of the Bildungsroman that flourished briefly during the first decade of the twentieth century in France. Rogers terms this subgenre the female Berufsroman, or novel of women's professional development. Career Stories will change the way we think about the Belle Epoque and the interwar period in French literary history, because these women writers and their novels changed the direction that fiction writing would take in post-World War I France.