Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France - Medicine and Literature

In her study of the literature and medical treatises of Enlightenment France, McAlpin explores the belief that premature puberty in young urban girls signalled an increasing moral and physical degeneration. Offering physiologically based readings of heroines in novels by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and Choderlos de Laclos, McAlpin shows that the Western view of women's sexuality as a mysterious, nebulous force has its secular origins in the mid-eighteenth century.

List of contents

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;

About the author

Mary McAlpin is Associate Professor of French at the University of Tennessee, USA.

Product details

• Authors: Mary Mcalpin, McAlpin Mary
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.05.2017
• EAN: 9781138110274
• ISBN: 978-1-138-11027-4
• No. of pages: 208
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Modern, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Western philosophy: Enlightenment