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This study of French writer/educator Felicite de Genlis examines both the way in which she theorized the maternal role in her works and the manner in which she lived out her own maternity. Genlis constructed a politics of motherhood that stretched and modulated the parameters of its socially defined role.
In this innovative study, the author carves out a new field, a sociology of literature in which he offers insightful commentary about the nexus of literature and society. Calling on history, sociology, and psychology as well as literature as points of reference, Allan Pasco examines the conceptual shift in the ideal of love in eighteenth-century France. Pasco explores the radical, though gradual, changes that occurred during the Enlightenment with respect to how the emotion of love was viewed. Earlier, love had been subordinate to the demands of family, king, and deity; passion was dangerous, and to be avoided. But over time, individual happiness became the "greatest good," and passion the measure of love. Authors as diverse as Marivaux, Marmontel, Rousseau, Baculard d'Arnaud, Pigault-Lebrun and Madame de Staël make it clear that the ideal of rapturous love did not live up to its billing: it did not last, and it brought destructive fantasies, an epidemic of disease, the "scourge" of divorce, and considerable anguish. Still, as Pasco points out, passion became and remained the ideal, and the Romantics were left to plumb its nature.
Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women – the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sph...
Eighteenth-century Spanish women were not idle bystanders during one of Europe's most dynamic eras. As Theresa Ann Smith skillfully demonstrates in this lively and absorbing book, Spanish intellectuals, calling for Spain to modernize its political, social, and economic institutions, brought the question of women's place to the forefront, as did women themselves. In explaining how both discourse and women's actions worked together to define women's roles in the nation, The Emerging Female Citizen not only illustrates the rising visibility of women, but also reveals the complex processes that led to women's relatively swift exit from most public institutions in the early 1800s. As artists, writers, and reformers, Spanish women took up pens, joined academies and economic societies, formed tertulias—similar to French salons—and became active in the burgeoning public discourse of Enlightenment. In analyzing the meaning of women's presence in diverse centers of Enlightenment, Smith offers a new interpretation of the dynamics among political discourse, social action, and gender ideologies.
The essays in this volume use the concept of heresy to gain insight into the value of social order during the eighteenth century. By applying the vocabulary of religion to behaviours that might more usually be studied as deviance, the contributors can account for the complexity and vehemence of conflicts over right order played out in the literary, artistic, and political arenas of the age. The essays examine a range of cultural encounters between orthodox and heterodox figures.
Focusing on images of or produced by nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-à-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By considering works in a range of media by an array of canonical and understudied women artists, they demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting.
In Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France, Katharine Ann Jensen analyzes the work of three pairs of women writing in French—Genlis and Lafayette, Colette and Annie de Pène, and Nancy Huson and Leïla Sebbar—to assess how their literary ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on the psychological aspects of the women’s relationships, the author combines close textual readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about literary ambition.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the maskilim, a group of young Jewish intellectuals who were starving for universal knowledge and for engagement with wider social circles, set out to reform Jewish society by expanding its cultural boundaries and building a bridge to the Enlightened world. Through dialogue with the non-Jewish society, and by introducing their fellow Jews to the texts and cultural goods of that society, mainly through translation, they sought to promote their social agenda and impart to their readers a new habitus, new social models of Bürgerlichkeit and Bildung, and a new awareness of civil equality and civil rights. This book explores this translational project and the ways by which it strove to affect a profound cultural change in the Jewish world. Zohar Shavit, professor emerita at the School for Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University, is an internationally renowned authority on the history of Israeli culture, child and youth culture, and Hebrew and Jewish cultures, especially in the context of their relations with various European cultures.
Through an intensive examination of photographs and engravings from European, Peruvian, and U.S. archives, Deborah Poole explores the role visual images and technologies have played in shaping modern understandings of race. Vision, Race, and Modernity traces the subtle shifts that occurred in European and South American depictions of Andean Indians from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and explains how these shifts led to the modern concept of "racial difference." While Andean peoples were always thought of as different by their European describers, it was not until the early nineteenth century that European artists and scientists became interested in developing a unique...