Through the Reading Glass

Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment

von Suellen Diaconoff

280 Seiten, Hardcover

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Argues that women's relationship to books and their promotion of reading contributed greatly to the cultural and intellectual vitality of the Enlightenment.2005 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that surrounded women's reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances, short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women. Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in women's work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create new kinds of responsible and not merely responsive readers, and an integral part of the conviction that domestic reading does not have to be trivial.

• Reihe: SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory
• Themen: Gesellschaft und Sozialwissenschaften Gesellschaft und Kultur, allgemein Gesellschaftliche Gruppen, Gemeinschaften und Identitäten Gruppen Frauen und Mädchen
• ISBN: 9780791464212
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 28.04.2005
• Größe: 235 x 157 mm
• Verlag: SUNY Press