Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment

Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment

Diaconoff, Suellen

Hardcover

Series: Suny Feminist Criticism and Theory

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0791464210
ISBN13: 9780791464212
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Apr 28 2005
Pages: 276
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.42 Depth: 8.60
Language: English

Argues that women's relationship to books and their promotion of reading contributed greatly to the cultural and intellectual vitality of the Enlightenment.

2005 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that surrounded women's reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances, short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women. Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in women's work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create new kinds of responsible and not merely responsive readers, and an integral part of the conviction that domestic reading does not have to be trivial.

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