WOMEN AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN by Dr. Karen O'Brien ( 9780521773492 )

Item Details

Title:

WOMEN AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£90.00
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ISBN 10:

0521773490

ISBN 13:

9780521773492

Publisher:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

1 March, 2009

Pages:

320

Description:

An original study of how Enlightenment ideas shaped the lives of women and the work of eighteenth-century women writers.

Synopsis:

During the long eighteenth century, ideas of society and of social progress were first fully investigated. These investigations took place in the contexts of economic, theological, historical and literary writings which paid unprecedented attention to the place of women. Combining intellectual history with literary criticism, Karen O'Brien examines the central importance to the British Enlightenment both of women writers and of women as a subject of enquiry. She examines the work of a range of writers, including John Locke, Mary Astell, David Hume, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, T. R. Malthus, the Bluestockings, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and the first female historians of the early nineteenth century. She explores the way in which Enlightenment ideas created a language and a framework for understanding the moral agency and changing social roles of women, without which the development of nineteenth-century feminism would not have been possible.

Publication:

Imprint:

Cambridge University Press

Returns:

Returnable

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