Moral Cupidity and Lettres de cachet in Diderot’s Writing
Moral Cupidity and Lettres de cachet in Diderot’s Writing

Author: Jennifer Vanderheyden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-01-03

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0429614810

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume explores the influence of the lettre de cachet on both Diderot’s personal life and his works, beginning with an examination of Diderot’s experience as recipient of two such arrest warrants, followed by an analysis of his references to these warrants in three of his fictional works, Le Père de famille, Jacques le fataliste and Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?. A scrutiny of Diderot’s mémoire/lettre novel La Religieuse proposes that, on the basis of moral cupidity, or self-gain, Madame Simonin sends her daughter Suzanne two veiled lettres de cachet that demand her confinement to a convent. The exploration of a fascinating real-life case of Henriette-Émilie de Bautru, a young comtesse whose mother confined her to a convent as a result of a lettre de cachet also based on motives of greed, leads to an examination of the similarities between Suzanne and the Comtesse in terms of their illegitimacy, questioning of authority and subsequent rebellion. A consideration of writing and communication in La Religieuse as they relate to this rebellion leads to an investigation of Diderot’s admiration of the mystery of female genius and artistic creativity as discussed in his essay Sur les femmes. The works of Julia Kristeva, especially her Post-Scriptum addressed to Diderot at the end of her work Thérèse mon amour: Thérèse d’Avila, serve as a theoretical basis for an interpretation of Suzanne’s experience as victim of a lettre de cachet and her search for a psychological rebirth of her être caché.

Forensic Storytelling and the Literary Roots of Early Modern Feminism
Forensic Storytelling and the Literary Roots of Early Modern Feminism

Author: Barbara Abrams

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 0429671342

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The writing of letters and the rise of the novel provided a way for some women to express themselves at a time when the all-male French Academy defined the very parameters of French literary acceptability and tradition. Women who were consigned to convents, workhouses or prisons were in most respects deprived of agency, yet many found ways to respond to the legal documents served against them. The letters and associated materials preserved in their legal files provide evidence that these women did not remain quiet, as they found means to resist authority. The forensic storytelling examined in this book supports the conclusion that the documents written in these constrained circumstances have both historical and literary merit and form the core of an understudied genre of literature.

Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France
Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France

Author: Nicole Bauer

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 3031122364

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book traces changing attitudes towards secrecy in eighteenth-century France, and explores the cultural origins of ideas surrounding government transparency. The idea of keeping secrets, both on the part of individuals and on the part of governments, came to be viewed with more suspicion as the century progressed. By the eve of the French Revolution, writers voicing concerns about corruption saw secrecy as part and parcel of despotism, and this shift went hand in hand with the rise of the idea of transparency. The author argues that the emphasis placed on government transparency, especially the mania for transparency that dominated the French Revolution, resulted from the surprising connections and confluence of changing attitudes towards honour, religious movements, rising nationalism, literature, and police practices. Exploring religious ideas that associated secrecy with darkness and wickedness, and proto-nationalist discourse that equated foreignness with secrecy, this book demonstrates how cultural shifts in eighteenth-century France influenced its politics. Covering the period of intense fear during the French Revolution and the paranoia of the Reign of Terror, the book highlights the complex interplay of culture and politics and provides insights into our attitudes towards secrecy today.

A Spy on Eliza Haywood
A Spy on Eliza Haywood

Author: Aleksondra Hultquist

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1000425606

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Eliza Haywood was one of the most prolific English writers in the Age of the Enlightenment. Her career, from Love in Excess (1719) to her last completed project The Invisible Spy (1755) spanned the gamut of genres: novels, plays, advice manuals, periodicals, propaganda, satire, and translations. Haywood’s importance in the development of the novel is now well-known. A Spy on Eliza Haywood links this with her work in the other genres in which she published at least one volume a year throughout her life, demonstrating how she contributed substantially to making women’s writing a locus of debate that had to be taken seriously by contemporary readers, as well as now by current scholars of political, moral, and social enquiries into the eighteenth century. Haywood’s work is essential to the study of eighteenth-century literature and this collection of essays continues the growing scholarship on this most important of women writers.

Narrating Cultural Encounter
Narrating Cultural Encounter

Author: Arnab Chatterjee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-10-27

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1000460169

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book interrogates and historicises eighteenth-century British women writers’ responses to India through the novel and travel writing to bring out the polyvalent space arising out of their complex negotiation with the colonial discourse. Though British women enjoyed their privileged racial status as the utilisers of colonial riches, they articulated their voice of dissent when they faced the politics of subordination in their own society and identified them with the marginalised status of the colonised Indians. This brings out the complicity and critique of the colonial discourse of British women writers and foregrounds their ambivalent responses to the colonial project. This book provides detailed textual analysis of the works of Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lady Morgan, Jemima Kindersley and Eliza Fay through critical insights from the idea of the Enlightenment, postcolonial theory and feminist thought. It also foregrounds new perspectives to colonial discourse vis-à-vis the representation of India by locating the dialogic strain within the British narratives about India.

Hannah More in Context
Hannah More in Context

Author: Kerri Andrews

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-01-13

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1000518442

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book relocates the long life and literary career of the poet, playwright, novelist, philanthropist and teacher Hannah More (1745-1833) in the wider social and cultural contexts that shaped her, and which she helped shape in turn. One of the most influential writers and campaigners of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, More’s reputation has suffered unfairly from accusations of paternalism and provincialism, and misunderstandings of her sincerely-held but now increasingly unfamiliar evangelical beliefs. Now, in this book, readers can explore a range of essays rooted in up-to-the-minute research which examines newly-recovered archival materials and other evidence in order to present the fullest picture yet of this complex and compelling author, and the era she helped mould with her words.

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain
Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain

Author: Mita Choudhury

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-07

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1351108735

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends considerably the parameters of on-going dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment. Thoughtfully interdisciplinary and with an allegiance to the culture which literary production engenders, this book describes how British identity emerges not despite of but due to its fluid, volatile, and subversive impulses and expressions. The imperial establishment—codified in the logics of the corporation, the academy, the cathedral, the theater, as well the private parlor or garden—derives its power and sustainability from scripting and then championing a solid resistance to precisely those subversive elements which threaten or undermine the foundations of order and liberalism in civil society. Choudhury argues that imperial Britain can best be understood in terms of this culture’s investment in spatial alignments which celebrated a radial interface with remote points of commercial interest. The volume contends Daniel Defoe, Arthur Onslow, David Garrick, Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, Hans Sloane, Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson, Charles Burney, George Frideric Handel were not merely part of a dazzling line-up of the architects of empire. In retrospect, their contributions and various engagements reflect remarkably modern patterns of the corporatization of culture and this culture’s dependence on, and thus its collusion with, commerce.

Castration, Impotence, and Emasculation in the Long Eighteenth Century
Castration, Impotence, and Emasculation in the Long Eighteenth Century

Author: Anne Leah Greenfield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-20

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1000760669

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This essay collection examines one of the most fearsome, fascinating, and hotly-discussed topics of the long eighteenth century: masculinity compromised. During this timespan, there was hardly a literary or artistic genre that did not feature unmanning regularly and prominently: from harrowing tales of castrations in medical treatises, to emasculated husbands in stage comedies, to sympathetic and powerful eunuchs in prose fiction, to glorious operatic performances by castrati in Italy, to humorous depictions in caricature and satirical paintings, to fearsome descriptions of Eastern eunuchs in travel narratives, to foolish and impotent old men who became a mainstay in drama. Not only does this unprecedented study of unmanning (in all of its varied forms) illustrate the sheer prevalence of a trope that featured prominently across literary and artistic genres, but it also demonstrates the ways diminished masculinity reflected some of the most strongly-held anxieties, interests, and values of eighteenth-century Britons.

Alexander Pope in The Reign of Queen Anne
Alexander Pope in The Reign of Queen Anne

Author: A. D. Cousins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1000264076

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the first collection of essays since George Sherburn’s landmark monograph The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934) to reconsider how the most important and influential poet of eighteenth-century Britain fashioned his early career. The volume covers Pope’s writings from across the reign of Queen Anne and just beyond. It focuses, in particular, on his interaction with the courtly culture constellated round the Queen. It examines, for instance, his representations of Queen Anne herself, his portrayals of politics and patronage under her reign, his negotiations with current literary theory, with the classical tradition, with chronologically distant yet also contemporaneous English poets, with current thought on the passions, and with membership of a religious minority. In doing so, it comprehensively reconsiders anew the ways in which Pope, increasingly supportive of Anne’s rule and mindful of the Virgilian rota, sought at first to realise his authorial aspirations.

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Epistolary Feminism
Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Epistolary Feminism

Author: Marijn S. Kaplan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-19

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1000071723

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice argues that Riccoboni is among the most significant women writers of the French Enlightenment due to her "epistolary feminism". Locating its source in her first novel Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), between fact and fiction, public and private, Marijn S. Kaplan provides new evidence supporting both the novel’s autobiography theory and de Maillebois hypothesis. Kaplan then traces how Riccoboni progressively develops a proto-feminist poetics of voice in her epistolary fiction, empowering women to resist patriarchal efforts to silence and appropriate them, which culminates in her final novel Lettres de Milord Rivers (1777). In nineteen relatively unknown letters (included, with translations) written over three decades to her publisher Humblot, several editors, Diderot, Laclos, Philip Thicknesse etc., Riccoboni is shown similarly to defend her oeuvre, her reputation, and her authority as a woman (writer), refusing to be manipulated and silenced by men.