Bromilow, Pollie

Dr. Pollie Bromilow is currently Lecturer in French in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Liverpool. She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of French at King’s College, Cambridge.

Models of Women in Sixteenth-Century French Literature

2007 0-7734-5332-6
Offers a feminist critique of the so-called “crisis of exemplarity” in late Renaissance texts by comparing and contrasting examples proposed to female readers in two collections of sixteenth-century French short stories, Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires tragiques and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. The author proposes that female exemplarity has its own poetics and cannot be considered simply as identical or symmetrical to male exemplarity. What emerges in the course of the study is an understanding of the different ways in which exemplarity enters the life of the female reader: through history, truth, invention, memory and strangeness.