Isabelle de Charri�re (Belle van Zuylen) has been known primarily as a novelist who experimented with narrative techniques to express her concern about the oppression of women in her society. Most scholarship has focused on only a small part of her work, her pre-revolutionary novels. This is one of the first synthetic studies of Charri�re's entire oeuvre , and it turns its attention to Charri�re's overlooked contribution as an intellectual in the eighteenth-century debate over education. In addition, Letzter analyzes ...
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Isabelle de Charri�re (Belle van Zuylen) has been known primarily as a novelist who experimented with narrative techniques to express her concern about the oppression of women in her society. Most scholarship has focused on only a small part of her work, her pre-revolutionary novels. This is one of the first synthetic studies of Charri�re's entire oeuvre , and it turns its attention to Charri�re's overlooked contribution as an intellectual in the eighteenth-century debate over education. In addition, Letzter analyzes the rhetorical and discursive strategies Charri�re employed to insert herself in this debate; a debate from which she was excluded because she was a woman and she was not French. Letzter's model for this analysis is the rhetorical figure of tacking, a nautical term used by Charri�re herself in order to describe her tactics for intellectual engagement within the gendered environment the gendered environment of revolutionary debate. Letzter demonstrates Charri�re's contribution as an important intellectual of the Revolution and of the post-revolutionary period, whose significance resided in her ability to express her ambivalence toward the theories and ideologies that ceaselessly imposed themselves on women.
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