In the two centuries since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she has become an icon of modern feminism: a stature that has paradoxically obscured her real historic significance. In this in-depth 2003 study of Wollstonecraft's thought, Barbara Taylor develops an alternative reading of her as a writer steeped in the utopianism of Britain's radical Enlightenment. Wollstonecraft's feminist aspirations, Taylor shows, were part of a revolutionary programme for universal equality and moral perfection that reached its zenith during the political upheavals of the 1790s but had its roots in the radical-Protestant Enlightenment. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works, and locating them in a vividly detailed account of her intellectual world and troubled personal history, Taylor provides a compelling portrait of this fascinating and profoundly influential thinker.
| ISBN: | 9780521661447 |
| Publication date: | 13th March 2003 |
| Author: | Barbara University of East London Taylor |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 352 pages |
| Series: | Cambridge Studies in Romanticism |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Literary studies: general Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 |