Literary representations of women writers in 17th-Century French Literature: the example of Sappho

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The publication of Boileau’s translation of the treatise On the Sublime radically changed the reception of Sappho in Western culture by presenting her as an exceptional example of a female sublime poet. Boileau’s Sappho is nevertheless an example of a vision that prevailed throughout the 17^th century that tends to evacuate the homoerotic drive from her work. This deformation is undoubtedly linked to an intrinsic instability of the figure of Sappho, whose uncertain contours are often drawn by contradictory traditions. In this study, I will try to reconstruct the course of the myth of Sappho and the different meanings it took in 17^th-century French literature. After quickly tracing the history of the appearance of Sappho in France, I will analyse works of fiction inspired by the poet and her literary biographies, with a special focus on the representation of the author as a woman writer and its social and aesthetic implications.

Speaker
Vincenzo De Santis
Università degli Studi di Salerno

Coordinator
Agnese Silvestri
Università degli Studi di Salerno