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Julie Candler Hayes explores the contributions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French women philosophers and intellectuals to moralist writing, a genre focusing on dispassionate observations on the human condition and traditionally viewed through its best-known male writers. This study, the first of its kind, includes both famous thinkers--such as Émilie Du Châtelet and Germaine de Staël--and nearly two dozen of their contemporaries. Hayes demonstrates how, through their critique of institutions and practices, their valorization of introspection and self-expression, and their engagement with philosophical issues, women moralists carved out an important space for the public exercise of their reason.
Her book is a sustained reflection on the aims and methods of contemporary translation studies and the most complete account available of the role of translation during a critical period in European history."--BOOK JACKET.
Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville combined fierce intellectual ambition with the proper demeanor of the wife of a leading magistrate. Bemoaning her lack of a formal education in childhood, as an adult she read widely, studied languages, and sought out mentors among the scientific elite of the day. Always publishing anonymously, her works included moralist philosophy, scientific and literary translations, original scientific research, fiction, and history. Recently, a trove of unpublished essays and autobiographical writings from her final years, long thought to have been lost, has come to light, revealing her as a writer of insight, wit, and feeling. Edited and translated by Julie Candler Hayes The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, volume 58
In this 1999 book, Julie Candler Hayes offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse. Taking issue both with traditional liberal and contemporary critical accounts of the Enlightenment, she analyses the writings of Denis Diderot, Emilie Du Châtelet, the Abbé de Condillac, Buffon, d'Alembert and numerous others, to argue for a new understanding of 'systematic reason' as complex, paradoxical and ultimately liberating. Hayes examines the tensions between freedom and constraint, abstraction and materialism, linear and synoptic order, that pervade not only philosophic and scientific discourse, but also epistolary writing, fiction and criticism. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of theorists from Adorno, Habermas and Foucault to Deleuze and Derrida, she offers a dialogue between the eighteenth century and our own, an ongoing exploration of the question, 'what is Enlightenment?'.
Containing essays by leading scholars representing a wide range of disciplines, this Companion offers new perspectives on the French Enlightenment. Clearly organized and easy to use, the volume provides a comprehensive overview of a period that marks the beginning of modern intellectual culture and political life.
Until recently, the marquise Du Ch telet (1706-1749) was more remembered as the companion of Voltaire than as an intellectual in her own right. While much has been written about his extraordinary output during the years he spent in her company, her own work has often been overshadowed. This volume brings renewed attention to Du Ch telet's intellectual achievements, including her free translation of selections from Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the bees; her dissertation on the nature and propagation of fire for the 1738 prize competition of the Acad mie des sciences; the 1740 Institutions de physique and ensuing exchange with the perpetual secretary of the Acad mie, Dortous de Mairan; her tw...
The eighteenth-century text Work on Women by Louise Dupin (also known as Madame Dupin, 1706-1799) is the French Enlightenment's most in-depth feminist analysis of inequality--and its most neglected one. Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin here offer the first-ever edition of selected translations of Dupin's massive project, developed from manuscript drafts. Hunter and Wilkin provide helpful introductions to the four sections of Work on Women (Science, History and Religion, Law, and Education and Mores) which contextualize Dupin's arguments and explain the work's construction--including the role of her secretary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Dupin's central claim in Work on Women is that French jurist...
In The Unfinished Enlightenment, Joanna Stalnaker offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier. Stalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science....
This book examines the public assertion of self by men and women in England, France and Germany from the Renaissance to Romanticism.
An innovative account of the literary Restoration that stresses its diversity, historical self-awareness, and openness to new voices.