Madame Roland

Madame Roland PDF Author: Ida Minerva Tarbell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster

The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster PDF Author: Julia V. Douthwaite
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226160572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This study looks at the lives of the most famous "wild children" of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angélique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized. A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.

History of Europe

History of Europe PDF Author: Archibald Alison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Catalogue of the London library. [With]

Catalogue of the London library. [With] PDF Author: Robert Harrison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1074

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The French Revolution

The French Revolution PDF Author: Nesta Helen Webster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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The Life of Barnave

The Life of Barnave PDF Author: E. D. Bradby
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Catalogue

Catalogue PDF Author: Bernard Quaritch (Firm)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiquarian booksellers
Languages : en
Pages : 982

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Robespierre

Robespierre PDF Author: Peter McPhee
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300118112
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
For some historians and biographers, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94) was a great revolutionary martyr who succeeded in leading the French Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds. For many others, he was the first modern dictator, a fanatic who instigated the murderous Reign of Terror in 1793-94. This masterful biography combines new research into Robespierre's dramatic life with a deep understanding of society and the politics of the French Revolution to arrive at a fresh understanding of the man, his passions, and his tragic shortcomings. Peter McPhee gives special attention to Robespierre's formative years and the development of an iron will in a frail boy conceived outside wedlock and on the margins of polite provincial society. Exploring how these experiences formed the young lawyer who arrived in Versailles in 1789, the author discovers not the cold, obsessive Robespierre of legend, but a man of passion with close but platonic friendships with women. Soon immersed in revolutionary conflict, he suffered increasingly lengthy periods of nervous collapse correlating with moments of political crisis, yet Robespierre was tragically unable to step away from the crushing burdens of leadership. Did his ruthless, uncompromising exercise of power reflect a descent into madness in his final year of life? McPhee reevaluates the ideology and reality of "the Terror," what Robespierre intended, and whether it represented an abandonment or a reversal of his early liberalism and sense of justice.

French Salons

French Salons PDF Author: Steven D. Kale
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801883866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnières as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an original, penetrating, and engaging analysis of elite culture and society in France before, during, and after the Revolution.

The World of the Salons

The World of the Salons PDF Author: Antoine Lilti
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199772347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The World of the Salons is a revisionist study of the French salon of the eighteenth century, arguing that it was a place governed by social hierarchy, not equality, connected to the world of the Court, and not the fount of the Enlightenment as has traditionally been believed.

Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France

Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France PDF Author: Mary McAlpin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317135903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
In her study of eighteenth-century literature and medical treatises, Mary McAlpin takes up the widespread belief among cultural philosophers of the French Enlightenment that society was gravely endangered by the effects of hyper-civilization. McAlpin's study explores a strong thread in this rhetoric of decline: the belief that premature puberty in young urban girls, supposedly brought on by their exposure to lascivious images, titillating novels, and lewd conversations, was the source of an increasing moral and physical degeneration. In how-to hygiene books intended for parents, the medical community declared that the only cure for this obviously involuntary departure from the "natural" path of sexual development was the increased surveillance of young girls. As these treatises by vitalist and vitalist-inspired physiologists became increasingly common in the 1760s, McAlpin shows, so, too, did the presence of young, vulnerable, and virginal heroines in the era's novels. Analyzing novels by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Choderlos de Laclos, she offers physiologically based readings of many of the period's most famous heroines within the context of an eighteenth-century discourse on women and heterosexual desire that broke with earlier periods in recasting female and male desire as qualitatively distinct. Her study persuasively argues that the Western view of women's sexuality as a mysterious, nebulous force-Freud's "dark continent"-has its secular origins in the mid-eighteenth century.