The fiction of enlightenment
Subtitle: women of reason in the French eighteenth century
By: Heidi Bostic
Publisher: University of Delaware Press; UNKNO
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Newark
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9780874130744
Description: "This book argues that women authors of the French eighteenth century claimed reason and contributed to Enlightenment. It begins by framing the Enlightenment as fiction, in two senses: first, what passes under the name of Enlightenment in much current critical discourse is a fiction, or a caricatured construct; second, works of fiction can illuminate Enlightenment. The book offers fresh readings of texts by the three most prominent women among eighteenth-century writers in French: Francoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charrière. These authors challenged the widely held idea that women's reason was inferior to men's. Literary forms--novels, stories, plays, essays, and letters--allowed these authors to approach the question of reason in particularly nuanced ways. Faithful to the eighteenth century, this project is also relevant to the twenty-first."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-259) and index.