Browsing by Subject "Eighteenth-century"
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Item Family Remains: the politics of legacy in eighteenth-century France(2014) Rutler, Tracy LeAnneThis dissertation accounts for the persistent occurrence of outsider figures (orphans, bastards, and exotic Others) in eighteenth-century French literature, and analyzes how these figures interrogate traditional and patriarchal models of family. As Michel Foucault argues in the first volume of History of Sexuality, the family unit serves as a generative site of power in early modern European societies. While Foucault focuses primarily on the marital and parents-children axes and their relevance to the formation of the individual political body, this dissertation analyzes how such power is also generated in the absence of these relationships. I argue that in their portrayal of figures that remain on the fringes of the family unit, the authors studied in this dissertation participate in a utopian experiment - one intended to create a better society through a discourse on evolved family relations. "Family Remains" combines structuralism with political and psychoanalytic theory to propose a new way of reading non-domestic fictional literature through the lens of the family. In so doing, it suggests that by arranging characters into non-heteronormative intimate communities, these authors create a new language of family politics, and in the process they propose new forms of power that are not necessarily passed from fathers to sons.