Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel (Texts and Translations) - Softcover

Rachilde

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0873529308 ISBN 13: 9780873529303

Publisher: Modern Language Association, 2004

Synopsis

When the rich and well-connected Raoule de Vénérande becomes enamoured of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule’s suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.

A writer and cultural arbiter of a salon in France from the early 1880s until 1930, Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery) won celebrity with this scandalously decadent novel. An inversion of the Pygmalion story, the book was judged to be pornographic, and a Belgian court sentenced its author (in absentia) to two years in prison. Verlaine congratulated Rachilde on the invention of a new vice.

About this title

About the Authors

Melanie Hawthorne is Professor of French at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, with special emphasis on prose fiction of the "Decadent" period and on women writers.

Liz Constable is Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies program at UC Davis. Her primary research areas focus on late nineteenth-century and twentieth century French and Francophone Cultural Studies and Film. She has published widely in these areas, including articles on Simone de Beauvoir and French women decadent writers.

Edition details

• Publisher: Modern Language Association
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0873529308
• ISBN 13: 9780873529303
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 211
• Editor: Hawthorne Melanie, Constable Liz