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Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Karen O'Brien author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:5th Mar '09

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Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain cover

An original study of how Enlightenment ideas shaped the lives of women and the work of eighteenth-century women writers.

Karen O'Brien examines the central importance to the British Enlightenment both of women writers and of women as a subject of enquiry. She explores the way in which Enlightenment ideas created a new way of thinking about the roles of women in society and paved the way for nineteenth-century feminism.During the long eighteenth century, ideas of society and of social progress were first fully investigated. These investigations took place in the contexts of economic, theological, historical and literary writings which paid unprecedented attention to the place of women. Combining intellectual history with literary criticism, Karen O'Brien examines the central importance to the British Enlightenment both of women writers and of women as a subject of enquiry. She examines the work of a range of writers, including John Locke, Mary Astell, David Hume, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, T. R. Malthus, the Bluestockings, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and the first female historians of the early nineteenth century. She explores the way in which Enlightenment ideas created a language and a framework for understanding the moral agency and changing social roles of women, without which the development of nineteenth-century feminism would not have been possible.

'a well researched intellectual book … scholars of the British Enlightenment of the eighteenth century would do well to study Professor Karen O'Brien's presentation.' Open History
'O'Brien employs a brilliant combination of exposition and argumentation.' Clio

ISBN: 9780521774277

Dimensions: 228mm x 152mm x 15mm

Weight: 510g

320 pages