Mary Seidman Trouille

Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment constitutes the first book-length feminist study of Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by women readers. By today's standards, Rousseau's sexual politics appear reactionary, paternalistic, even blatantly misogynist; yet, among his female contemporaries, his works often met with enthusiastic approval and had tremendous impact on their values and behavior. To probe Rousseau's paradoxical appeal to eighteenth-century readers, Mary Trouille examines how seven women authors responded to his writings and sexual politics and traces his influence on their lives and works. The writers include six Frenchwomen (Roland, d'Epinay, Stael, Genlis, Gouges, and an anonymous woman correspondent who called herself Henriette) and the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The book constitutes an important contribution to French literature, women's studies, and eighteenth-century cultural studies. While a great deal has already been written on the individual women whom Trouille treats, what distinguishes this book is that it places multiple female subjects directly opposite Rousseau, and succeeds in showing that the relationship between mentor and student(s) is both multi-layered and fascinatingly complex.

Produktdetails

• Suny Series, the Margins of Li
• Verlag: State University of New York Press
• Seitenzahl: 422
• Erscheinungstermin: August 1997
• Englisch
• Gewicht: 744g
• ISBN-13: 9780791434895
• ISBN-10: 0791434893
• Artikelnr.: 54149120

Autorenporträt

Mary Seidman Trouille is Associate Professor of French at Illinois State University. She is translator of The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism and of Les Lieux de Memoire.