
Subject of Desire
Petrarchan Poetics and the Female Voice in Louise Labe
Deborah Lesko Baker(Author)
Purdue University Press
Published on 1. August 1996
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-55753-088-2 (ISBN)
Description
The French Renaissance poet Louise Labe is one of the most striking and influential women writers of early modern Europe. In her broad-ranging volume of prose and poetic works (1555), Labe transforms the position of woman in Renaissance discourse from an object to a subject of erotic and artistic desire and privileges the notion of desire itself as a central problem for literary and psychic exploration.
Deborah Lesko Baker presents the dramatic creation and evolution of female subjectivity in Labe as a passionate quest for internal selfhood made possible both through authentic self-study and self-expression and through authentic connection and exchange with others in the real world. In so doing she analyzes how the development of the female subject coincides with an ongoing interrogation of the inherited models of the Petrarchan lyric tradition.
The Subject of Desire traces Labe's restructuring of the female subject and speaking voice through a detailed, integrated study of all four texts comprising the 1555 xuvres. Through a series of close readings, the book highlights Labe's revision of Petrarchan poetics and her creation of an original voice in the evolution of the French Renaissance lyric. In detailing Labe's movement from acute interiority to active exteriority, The Subject of Desire reveals how Labe struggles to construct a new set of values concerning communication about love in both public and private discourse-values that her readers are called upon to consider as they face the complexities of their own personal experiences.
Deborah Lesko Baker presents the dramatic creation and evolution of female subjectivity in Labe as a passionate quest for internal selfhood made possible both through authentic self-study and self-expression and through authentic connection and exchange with others in the real world. In so doing she analyzes how the development of the female subject coincides with an ongoing interrogation of the inherited models of the Petrarchan lyric tradition.
The Subject of Desire traces Labe's restructuring of the female subject and speaking voice through a detailed, integrated study of all four texts comprising the 1555 xuvres. Through a series of close readings, the book highlights Labe's revision of Petrarchan poetics and her creation of an original voice in the evolution of the French Renaissance lyric. In detailing Labe's movement from acute interiority to active exteriority, The Subject of Desire reveals how Labe struggles to construct a new set of values concerning communication about love in both public and private discourse-values that her readers are called upon to consider as they face the complexities of their own personal experiences.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
West Lafayette
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-55753-088-2 (9781557530882)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Deborah Lesko Baker is an associate professor of French at Georgetown University, USA. She is author of Narcissus and the Lover: Mythic Recovery and Reinvention in Sceve's "Delie" and of articles on Renaissance poetry and mythic structures in literary texts.