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Based on a True Story, Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that makes her suddenly conscious of her race - and of the prejudice it arouses.
From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe.
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 in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind." An inspiration for Fowles's acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ourika will astonish and haunt modern readers.
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Previews available in: French English
Subjects
Fiction, Race relations, Africans, Black Women, 19th century fiction, Novels, other prose & writers: 19th century, Continental European, General, Plays / Drama, French, Literary Criticism, Literature - Classics / Criticism, Classics, European - French, Fiction, general, France, fiction, Blacks, fiction, Women, blackPlaces
FranceTimes
19th centuryShowing 3 featured editions. View all 17 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
Ourika
1998, University of Exeter Press
in French
- Nouv. ed. rev. et augm., avec le texte corrigé de l'auteur.
0859895734 9780859895736
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2
Ourika: the original French text
1994, Modern Language Association of America
in English
0873527798 9780873527798
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3 |
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. xxv-xxvi).
Classifications
The Physical Object
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Work Description
Based on a true story, Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that makes her suddenly conscious of her race - and of the prejudice it arouses.
From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe.
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 in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind." An inspiration for Fowles's acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ourika will astonish and haunt modern readers.
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