Colette and the Incest Taboo

That Most Disturbing of Drives

Dr.Carol Mastrangelo Bove

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English

Anthem Press
14 January 2025

Literary studies: from c 1900 -

Series: Anthem symploke Studies in Theory

Informed by Julia Kristeva's work, this book approaches Colette's writing and its translation along with two films via close, psychoanalytic readings.

This book makes an argument critical to literary theory and sexuality in 2022. It argues that Colette's fiction portrays a woman struggling to live in the throes of the incest taboo, understood in its psychological implications for power relations both private and public, then and now. Informed by Julia Kristeva's work, it approaches Colette's writing and its translation along with two films via close, psychoanalytic readings.

It demonstrates that this version of Kristeva's psychoanalytic theory, in an accessible form and with emphasis on the psychology of women and social transformation, helps to read Colette for the twenty-first century as well as to show how Kristeva's theory works. This volume examines especially Colette's most admired novels, especially from the second half of her life, including the much misunderstood La Maison de Claudine (1922), where the incest taboo surfaces in the relationship of the narrator with the mother. The taboo had appeared two years earlier in Chri (1920), in the rapport between the maternal La, a woman of a certain age, and the young man, Chri; finally, in Gigi, the incest taboo characterises the relations between the young teenager of the eponymous title and her much older, uncle figure Gaston.

By: Dr.Carol Mastrangelo Bove
Imprint: Anthem Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Volume: 1
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781839990489
ISBN 10: 1839990481
Series: Anthem symploke Studies in Theory
Pages: 180
Publication Date: 14 January 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Chapter 1--An Overview of Colette’s Life and Work: Incestuous Desire; Chapter 2--A Woman of a Certain Age : Chéri (1920); Chapter 3--La Maison de Claudine (1922) : Maman Not Claudine; Chapter 4—Gigi (1944) : The Importance of the Uncle; Chapter 5—More Than a Musical, Romantic Adaptation for the Screen: Vincent Minelli’s Gigi (1958); Chapter 6--Wash Westmoreland’s Colette (2018): Willy? Far From the Father of Individual Pre-History

Carol Mastrangelo Bovis Professor Emerita in English and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She is also Professor Emerita in French, Westminster College, PA, USA. She has publishedLanguage and Politics in Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy(2006),Kristeva in America: Re-imagining the Exceptional(2020), and many articles on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film and literary translation.