Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment constitutes the first book-length feminist study of Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by women readers. By today's standards, Rousseau's sexual politics appear reactionary, paternalistic, even blatantly misogynist; yet, among his female contemporaries, his works often met with enthusiastic approval and had tremendous impact on their values and behavior. To probe Rousseau's paradoxical appeal to eighteenth-century readers, Mary Trouille examines how seven women authors responded to his writings and sexual politics and traces his influence on their lives and works. The writers include six Frenchwomen (Roland, d'Epinay, Stael, Genlis, Gouges, and an anonymous woman correspondent who called herself Henriette) and the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The book constitutes an important contribution to French literature, women's studies, and eighteenth-century cultural studies. While a great deal has already been written on the individual women whom Trouille treats, what distinguishes this book is that it places multiple female subjects directly opposite Rousseau, and succeeds in showing that the relationship between mentor and student(s) is both multi-layered and fascinatingly complex.

This 1988 volume addresses sexual phenomena in eighteenth-century Europe that were outside the legal or sanctified systems of acceptability.

De onderkant van Verlichting en tolerantie: (homo)sexualiteit, pornografie e.d. (o.a. over Fanny Hill) in de sociaal-politieke context van de Britse 18e eeuw. - De relevante artikelen zijn afzonderlijk ontsloten.

Taking the Enlightenment and the feminist tradition to which it gave rise as its historical and philosophical coordinates, Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment explores the coincidence of feminist vindications and travel in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the way travel's utopian dimension and feminism's utopian ideals have intermittently fed off each other in productive ways. Travel's gender politics is analyzed in the works of J.-J. Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Germaine de Staël, Frances Burney, Flora Tristan, Suzanne Voilquin, Gustave Flaubert George Sand, Robyn Davidson, and Sara Wheeler.

Explores the way seven women writers of the eighteenth century responded to Rousseau, and traces his crucial influence on their literary careers.

Sex in the Eighteenth-century was not simply a pleasure; it had profound philosophical and political implications. This book explores those implications, and in particular the links between sexual freedom and liberty in a variety of European and British contexts. Discussing prostitutes and politicians, philosophers and charlatans, confidence tricksters and novelists, Libertine Enlightenment presents a fascinating overview of the sexual dimension of enlightened modernity.

Styles of Enlightenment argues that alongside its democratic ideals and its efforts to create a unified public sphere, the Enlightenment also displayed a tendency to erect rigid barriers when it came to matters of style and artistic expression. The French philosophes tackled the issue of the hierarchy of genres with surprising inflexibility, and they looked down on those forms of art that they saw as commercial, popular, and merely entertaining. They were convinced that the standard of taste was too important a matter to be left to the whims of the public and the vagaries of the marketplace: aesthetic judgment ought to belong to a few, enlightened minds who would then pass it on to the masses. Through readings of fictions, essays, memoirs, eulogies, and theatrical works by Fénelon, Bouhours, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Mercier, Thomas, and others, Styles of Enlightenment traces the stages of a confrontation between the virile philosophe and the effeminate worldly writer, "good" and "bad" taste, high art and frivolous entertainment, state patronage and the privately sponsored marketplace, the academic eulogy and worldly conversation. It teases out the finer points of division on the public battlefields of literature and politics and the new world of contesting sexual economies.