Mary Wollstonecraft S Social And Aesthetic Philosophy

Mary Wollstonecraft's Social and Aesthetic Philosophy examines attempts to revise representations of women to give them a more active role in public life. Combining history of ideas with close textual reading to position her in relation to other eighteenth century writers this book demonstrates how she is directly engaged in re-thinking key concepts in moral aesthetic and social philosophy, particularly where women are concerned. Bahar insists that Wollstonecraft's political claims cannot be separated from her desire to develop more convincing aesthetic representations of women.

"Several of the papers in this volume were first presented at a conference on The Social and Political Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft at Birkbeck, University of London in May 2013. This workshop itself was a follow-up to a conference on Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy and Enlightenment in Lund University in February 2012."--Page vii.

Interest in the contribution made by women to the history of philosophy is burgeoning. Intense research is underway to recover their works which have been lost or overlooked. At the forefront of this revival is Mary Wollstonecraft. While she has long been studied by feminists, and later discovered by political scientists, philosophers themselves have only recently begun to recognise the value of her work for their discipline. This volume brings together new essays from leading scholars, which explore Wollstonecraft's range as a moral and political philosopher of note, both taking a historical perspective and applying her thinking to current academic debates. Subjects include Wollstonecraft's ideas on love and respect, friendship and marriage, motherhood, property in the person, and virtue and the emotions, as well as the application her thought has for current thinking on relational autonomy, and animal and children's rights. A major theme within the book places her within the republican tradition of political theory and analyses the contribution she makes to its conceptual resources.

Mary Wollstonecraft is a writer whose work continues to provoke scholarly debate. Halldenius explores Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy, focusing on her treatment of republicanism and independence, to propose a new way of reading her work – that of a ‘feminist republican’.

This Handbook discusses representative philosophers in the history of the philosophy of law and social philosophy, giving clear concise expert definitions and explanations of key personalities and their ideas. It provides an essential reference for experts and newcomers alike.

The essays in this collection represent the explosion of scholarly interest since the 1960s in the pioneering feminist, philosopher, novelist, and political theorist, Mary Wollstonecraft. This interdisciplinary selection, which is organized by theme and genre, demonstrates Wollstonecraft's importance in contemporary social, political and sexual theory and in Romantic studies. The book examines the reception of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman but it also deals with the full range of her work from travel writing, education, religion and conduct literature to her novels, letters and literary reviews. As well as reproducing the most important modern Wollstonecraft scholarship the collection tracks the development of the author's reputation from the nineteenth century. The essays reprinted here (from early appreciations by George Eliot, Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf to the work of twenty-first century scholars) include many of the most influential accounts of Wollstonecraft's remarkable contribution to the development of modern political and social thought. The book is essential reading for students of Wollstonecraft and late eighteenth-century women's writing, history, and politics.

Best known as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), if not also as mother of Frankenstein's author Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft survived domestic violence and unusual independent womanhood to write engaging letters, fiction, history, critical reviews, handbooks and treatises. Her work on coeducational thought was a major early modern influence upon the development of a post-Enlightenment tradition, and continues to have vital relevance today. Celebrated as an early modern feminist, abolitionist and socialist philosopher, Wollstonecraft had little formal schooling, but still worked as a governess, school-teacher and educational writer. This succinct critical account of that prolific research begins by recounting her revolutionary self-education. Susan Laird explains how Wollstonecraft came to criticize moral flaws in both men's and women's private education based on irrational assumptions about 'sexual character' under the Divine Right of Kings. It was to remedy those moral flaws of monarchist education that Wollstonecraft theorized her influential, but incomplete, concept of publicly financed, universal, egalitarian coeducation.

A compelling portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft that shows the intimate connections between her life and work Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women's rights advocacy. However, as Sylvana Tomaselli shows, a full understanding of Wollstonecraft’s thought is possible only through a more comprehensive appreciation of Wollstonecraft herself, as a philosopher and moralist who deftly tackled major social and political issues and the arguments of such figures as Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Reading Wollstonecraft through the lens of the politics and culture of her own time, this book restores her to her rightful place as a major eighteenth-century thinker, reminding us why her work still resonates today. The book’s format echoes one that Wollstonecraft favored in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: short essays paired with concise headings. Under titles such as “Painting,” “Music,” “Memory,” “Property and Appearance,” and “Rank and Luxury,” Tomaselli explores not only what Wollstonecraft enjoyed and valued, but also her views on society, knowledge and the mind, human nature, and the problem of evil—and how a society based on mutual respect could fight it. The resulting picture of Wollstonecraft reveals her as a particularly engaging author and an eloquent participant in enduring social and political concerns. Drawing us into Wollstonecraft’s approach to the human condition and the debates of her day, Wollstonecraft ultimately invites us to consider timeless issues with her, so that we can become better attuned to the world as she saw it then, and as we might wish to see it now.