Ourika: The Original French Text
About this ebook
A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine; the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist; and, as John Fowles points out, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind."
About the author
Born in 1777, Claire de Duras fled France after her father was executed during the French Revolution. In London, she married the duke of Durfort and of Duras, and they returned to France in 1808. Ourika, published anonymously in 1823, was one of five novels Duras had written the previous year; only two of them were published during her lifetime. She died in 1828.
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).
