| | 2000 Proceedings (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25) |
 | | For Undank, Lettres d’une Péruvienne is a novel which "will eventually be appropriated by society at large and even trivialized into a fashion, without altering the status of either women or the dispossessed" (311, my italics), read "ordinary women — or men — in Peru" and ultimately in France too. |
| | Because of the author’s fear of being exposed to ridicule in the drawing rooms of the time, modeling one’s own writing on what was fashionable and well-accepted was safer than radical innovation, especially for a woman author attempting not to provoke professional critics at the beginning of her literary career. |
| | In the "Preface" to Lettres d’une Péruvienne, Graffigny establishes a strategic and recognizable link to one of these types of contemporary fashionable literature by quoting a phrase well-known to her readers, that is Montesquieu’s "Comment peut-on être Persan?," "How can one be Persian?" (3), from his epistolary novel Lettres persanes (in Graffigny 3). |
| www.ndsu.edu /RRCWL/V2/Hilger.html (2674 words) |
