In this long-awaited and definitive study, Nelly Furman presents the Carmen story as the central myth of modernity — not of its founding but of its simultaneous unfounding, in which the femme fatale emerges as a projection of anxieties of race, gender, and other 'others.' As readable as it is refined, this wise and wonderful book teaches us not only about opera, film, literature, and language, but about ourselves.
Nelly Furman is a scholar of French nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature with an interest in textual criticism, women, and feminist studies. She currently serves as Director of both the Office of Programs and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages at the Modern Language Association, and is a Professor Emerita at Cornell University. She is the author of La Revue des Deux Mondes et le Romantisme (1831-1848) (1975) and
co-editor of Women and Language in Literature and Society (1980).