In recent years, the figure of the Muslim Woman has loomed large over mainstream feminist debate in France. Cast alternately as a Frenchwoman-in-the-making or a veiled threat, the Muslim Woman has become emblematic of France's relationship to those identified as its cultural others. But throughout these debates, and in spite of their scale and passion, one view has been glaringly absent: the view of French Muslim women themselves.
Drawing on sociological, polemical and literary writings, this thoughtful and wide-ranging study examines the unacknowledged colonial roots of French feminist...

Whether in the pages of a trashy novel, in the glow of gaslights, in a dance hall, or on the walls of art galleries, the figure of the female dancer haunts nineteenth-century French culture. Artists and writers of all kinds took on la danseuse as an emblem of their own artistic prowess. They represented her alternately as an elusive ideal, a saucy prostitute, or a dangerous seductress. Dancers, in turn, produced their own images, novels and autobiographies, thereby contributing to an ongoing cultural debate around performance, spectatorship, desire, and art. In this interdisciplinary study of...

This study reveals reading to be one of the main activities to occupy the inhabitants of the world of Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu . Characters do not just read books but have access to the journals and newspapers of a rapidly expanding print industry. They receive letters and postcards from family and friends. The posters of a nascent advertising industry tempt them to spend an evening at the theatre or a holiday by the sea, and new forms of communication, such as telegraphy, enter their lives and require new strategies of deciphering. All human activity is glossed by...