Product Description: This is the first study to account the origins of French feminism to Neoclassical theatre and the court of Louis XIV. Through feminist revisionist histories of French literature, the Neoclassical plots and female archetypes from Racine's "Phedre" and "Andromache", Voltaire's "Brutus" (Catherine Bernard), and Marmontel's "Belisarius" (Stephanie Genlis) were transposed by women writers and patrons onto actresses and the queens, empresses, and mistresses of the French ruling dynasties from Louis XIV- to Napoleon at a time when women were denied the rights of citizenship...read more