Ellamae Lepper el415@cam.ac.uk
United Kingdom
French, St Catharine's College
PhD thesis: Salons in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction
Research interests:
1. Nineteenth-century French literature
2. Gender theory
3. Cultural history
4. The novel
My PhD research explores depictions of salon culture in novels written between 1800 and 1848, focusing on Mme de Staël, Stendhal, and Balzac. Since the early seventeenth century, the salon of a grand home has held particular significance in French culture as the quintessential meeting-place for high society; the spirited conversation at salon gatherings has also been associated with many of the country’s most influential intellectual women. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida and Judith Still, I investigate the salon’s literary role as a space for novelists to reflect on questions of hospitality and social imitation, and also explore how salon scenes might shed light on the complex interrelationship between acts of hosting and acts of narration. Through this approach, I aim to tie together two threads of debate over the space women occupy in narratives of French literary history – that surrounding the salon and that surrounding the nineteenth-century novel.
Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?
I first encountered Dena Goodman’s influential work on Enlightenment salonnières during my undergraduate studies in French and Russian. Goodman’s approach was an intriguing introduction to the field of cultural history, as well as an inspiring example of feminist research, and I became drawn towards depictions of salons in the nineteenth-century works I was studying. However, I found little dedicated research into the fictional salons of this era. The more I paid attention to these authors’ notions of the salon, the more interesting they became, and so I decided to make them the basis of my proposal for PhD research.