1st Edition
Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France Medicine and Literature
By Mary McAlpin
Copyright 2012
208 Pages
by
Routledge
208 Pages
by
Routledge
208 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
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... Read more
Introduction: Daughters of Eve; Chapter 1 Puberty and the Splitting of the Single Sex; Chapter 2 Women as Bellwethers of Cultural Degradation; Chapter 3 Julie d’Etange, or Sexuality and the Virtuous Heroine; Chapter 4 The Marquise de Merteuil, or Sexuality in the State of Nature; Chapter 5 Marie-Jeanne Roland, or Sexuality and the Republic of Virtue; conclusion Conclusion: Sade’s Way;
Biography
Mary McAlpin is Associate Professor of French at the University of Tennessee, USA.
'McAlpin's close accounting of the symptoms of vitalism on the body of the novel clarifies the degree to which the adolescent girl played a starring role in an Enlightenment discourse of cultural degradation that fueled both the development of imaginative literature and the medical attempt to explain the relation between the social and the individual as a function of the imagination’s work on the body.' H-France
