The Lettres Portugaises: Scripting and selling female desire.

This article builds on previous literary scholarship to analyse the social and publication history of the enormously successful Lettres portugaises (1669), five letters published in the voice of an anonymous Portuguese nun to a French officer. Although the letters were based on an ancient model, thi...

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Publicado en:Gender & History Vol. 36; no. 2; pp. 369 - 386
Autor principal: O'Leary, Jessica
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Wiley-Blackwell Jul2024
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: The Lettres Portugaises: Scripting and selling female desire.
      aug:
        au: O'Leary, Jessica
        affil: Australian Catholic University, AU, Australian
      su:
        Lettres Portugaises (Book)
        Letter writing
        Nuns as authors
        Heterosexuality
        Love
        Women's history
        History & gender
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          Lettres Portugaises (Book)
          Letter writing
          Nuns as authors
          Heterosexuality
          Love
          Women's history
          History & gender
      ab: This article builds on previous literary scholarship to analyse the social and publication history of the enormously successful Lettres portugaises (1669), five letters published in the voice of an anonymous Portuguese nun to a French officer. Although the letters were based on an ancient model, this article suggests that their references to contemporary gendered constructions of biology and love, especially for enclosed women, were successfully used by publishers to commercialise a historically recurring gender binary of heterosexual love: men were rejected and women were abandoned. The popularity of the text was such that it entrenched notions of women's helplessness in matters of the heart for almost three centuries. This article argues that the Lettres portugaises' success was as much the result of the text's literary qualities as it was of the canny paratextual strategies deployed by seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century publishers to sell the book, its sequels and its imitations.
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    language: English
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