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Colette
Brief Description
This intellectual biography of Colette—the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy on female genius—represents a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century. Colette (1873–1954) was a prolific novelist celebrated for exploring sexual pleasure and inventing a language for it...
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Colette
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The final volume of Julia Kristeva’s trilogy on “female genius,” Colette interlaces commentary on the life and work of the notorious French novelist who made it possible for women to write erotic literature.
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Description
This intellectual biography of Colette—the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy on female genius—represents a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century.
Colette (1873–1954) was a prolific novelist celebrated for exploring sexual pleasure and inventing a language for it at a time when women writers were hesitant to address the topic. Female sexuality in a male-dominated world, alongside the joys and pains of love, served as her main themes. Her novels—Cheri, La Chatte, and Gigi, among them—blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction long before autobiographical novels became commonplace. She married three times, had both male and female lovers, and for a time supported herself as a mime, performing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died, she received the first state funeral ever given to a woman by the French Republic.
Colette's writing drew inspiration from entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, and fin de siècle gay aesthetes. She admired those living on the sexual edge and was accused of moral corruption in intellectual matters—publishing in pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic journals during the Occupation, even as she fought to keep her Jewish third husband from deportation. Kristeva deftly examines Colette's controversial life and work and considers two of her most important influences, Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust. Paying particular attention to the language used by the French writer to "say the unsayable and name the unnameable", Kristeva offers an elegant and sophisticated critique of Colette's psychological conflicts, particularly her sexual relationships, and how these conflicts are both recorded in and resolved through the act of writing.
Appealing to Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as the Oedipus complex, perversion, the symbolic, and melancholy, Kristeva opens Colette's oeuvre to psychoanalytic interpretation. The lasting impression is of a woman intent on experiencing the world's pleasures—its jouissance.
Series: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780231223911
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 16 June 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Illustration: 10 halftones
Contributors:
- Translated by Jane Marie Todd
Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education
DIMENSIONS
Width: 140.0mm
Height: 216.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 504
About the Author
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.”
Jane Marie Todd (1957–2021) translated more than ninety books for university presses and art museums.
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