Women Writers In Pre Revolutionary France

This extensive collection of English-language essays examines the many strategies of resistance to male domination that women in France from the 16th through the 18th centuries utilized in their lives and their writings.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This historical study examines the way women used writing to create themselves as modern individuals in post-Revolutionary France.--From publisher description.

Examines the full spectrum of women's participation in the social, economic, religious, and poetic debates surrounding the French Revolution.

British Women Writers and the French Revolution provides an overview of a wide range of British women's writings on the French Revolution, from writers sympathetic to the Revolution like Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith, to anti-revolutionary writers like Hannah More and Jane West. Based on new research in French and British archives and libraries, the book uncovers little-known writings by British women, and argues that these writers developed a distinct antinationalism, in some cases even a feminist cosmopolitanism, in their responses to the European revolutionary crisis.

The pre-Revolutionary call for the feminization of culture acquired new and controversial meaning during the Revolution debate with the claims of Mary Wollstonecraft and others for intellectual, vocational, sexual, and even political equality with men. But women writers of the period were faced with a literary discourse that assigned learned, sublime, and controversial genres, and public and political themes, to men. Women writers therefore undertook bold literary experiments that were derided and suppressed in their time, and which are still misunderstood.

At the same time it demonstrates how the Revolution fostered many dreams and ambitions for women that would be doomed to disappointment in the repressive post-Revolutionary era.".