Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination

Erscheinungsjahr 2003
ISBN: 978-0-521-66144-7
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 56, 352 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 722 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

In the two centuries since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she has become an icon of modern feminism: a stature that has paradoxically obscured her real historic significance. In this in-depth 2003 study of Wollstonecraft's thought, Barbara Taylor develops an alternative reading of her as a writer steeped in the utopianism of Britain's radical Enlightenment. Wollstonecraft's feminist aspirations, Taylor shows, were part of a revolutionary programme for universal equality and moral perfection that reached its zenith during the political upheavals of the 1790s but had its roots in the radical-Protestant Enlightenment. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works, and locating them in a vividly detailed account of her intellectual world and troubled personal history, Taylor provides a compelling portrait of this fascinating and profoundly influential thinker.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Taylor, Barbara

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments; Introduction: Mary Wollstonecraft and the paradoxes of feminism; Part I. Imagining Women: 1. The female philosopher; 2. The chimera of womanhood; 3. For the love of God; Part II. Feminism and Revolution: 4. Wollstonecraft and British radicalism; 5. Perfecting civilization; 6. Gallic philosophesses; 7. Women vs. the polity; 8. The female citizen; 9. Jemima and the beginnings of modern feminism; Epilogue: the fantasy of Mary Wollstonecraft; Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Taylor, Barbara
Barbara Taylor is Reader in History in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. She is a leading intellectual and cultural historian, specialising in the history of feminism, and the author of Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century and numerous articles on Mary Wollstonecraft.