Corneille's Horace and David's Oath of the Horatii

Gutwirth (emerita, French and women's studies, West Chester U.) conducts a feminist analysis of gendered aesthetics and politics in Jacque-Louis David's 1784 painting Oath of the Horatii, "a work of crucial significance in French Revolutionary culture." While others have already explored this topic, Gutwirth offers a new approach that builds on their work while also exploring the painting in relation to its classical sources (the subject is taken from Livy and Dionysius) and to the 1640 play Horace, by Pierre Corneille, built on the same classical sources. She investigates how the different climates of gender relations within which the works were produced affected the gender dispensations represented in the painting and the play. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Madelyn Gutwirth, Professor Emerita of French and Women’s Studies at West Chester University, received her BA from Brooklyn College and her MA and her PhD from Bryn Mawr College. She is author of Madame de Stael, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (1978) and co-editor (with Avriel Goldberger and Karyna Szmurlo) of Germaine de Stael: Crossing the Borders (1991). Her Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (1992) was awarded Honorable Mention in competition for the Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1993. She has been a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center.