Ourika

Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the French Revolution.

Joan DeJean's books reflect her areas of research: the history of women's writing in France (Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France); the history of sexuality (Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937); the development of the novel (Literary Fortifications; Libertine Strategies); and the cultural history and the material culture of late 17th- and early 18th-century France (Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle; The Essence of Style, 2005; The Age of Comfort). Margaret Waller is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. Her publications include The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (Rutgers UP, 1993) and a translation of Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (Columbia UP, 1984).