Germaine De Stael Research Articles

Путевые записки «Россия и русские» Виктора Тиссо в контексте русско-французских отношений на рубеже XIX-XX вв.

For the first time in the national literary studies, the article examines the book of travel notes Russia and Russians (1882) by the French writer Victor Tissot (1845-1917). Tissot’s travel notes on Russia are considered in the context of Russian-French relations at the turn of the 20th century, Russia’s growing interest in France on the eve of the conclusion of the Russian-French alliance. The article proves that the basic opposition constructing the image of Russia in Tissot’s book is the opposition of Russia and Ukraine. Tissot poetizes the image of Little Russia (which is understood not without the influence of ideas of Adam Miczkevich and Cyprien Robert) as the custodian of the original “Slavicness.” Despite the poetization of Ukraine, Tissot considered Moscow the true center of the Russian Empire, the city expressing the spirit of the country. The influence on Tissot’s travel notes about Russia by Theophile Gautier, impressionism, the traditions of Germaine de Stael is shown. Tissot sought to contrast the tradition of Gautier’s “aestheticized” discourse about about Russia with a more “realistic” image of Moscow and Russia by expanding the scope of the depicted, by describing not only the ceremonial, but also the shadow life of Moscow and Russia. The characteristic feature of Tissot’s poetics is the combination of aesthetics with macabre and gothic elements in the structure of the image of Russia. The article concludes that Tissot made a significant contribution to the destruction of the myth of Russia’s closedness, created by Custine and the Paris press, and to the generation of a generally positive image of Russia on the eve of the conclusion of the Russian-French alliance. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Матрица «культурного неблагополучия»

The article analyzes the matrix as a special form of understanding and describing the phenomena of a foreign culture. The principles of the formation of ideas about the "cultural disadvantage" of Russians are analyzed. Over time, the "Western" discourse about Russia becomes more sophisticated and harsher; it can take the form of economic sanctions, political pressure, recommendations, and clothe itself in the form of "soft" and "hard" power. But its structure remains unchanged, which allows us to see the matrix basis of this kind of representations. The matrix construction is used as a set of initial assessments in the attitude of "cultural disadvantage". To analyze the matrix construction as an organization of ideas about a different culture, the authors of the 19th century Germaine de Stael and Astolphe de Custine are involved, who, to varying degrees, expressed their ideas about the "cultural disadvantage" of Russians. In modern discourse, this practice has found expression in the Eurocentric theoretical constructions of S. Huntington and L. Harrison. The contradiction between the Eurocentric thesis about the uniqueness of Western culture and tactical, pragmatic, applied programs of reforming and reformatting non-European cultures according to the European model is shown. The article analyzes the main points of criticism of Eurocentrism by E. Said in his concept of "orientalism". The concept of the "east", in a broad sense, is formed in the European tradition not as an alternative to the West, but as its invention, its quasi-object. "East" is a special tactic of opposing the "center" and the periphery, of historical progress beyond historical immobility. The East does not correlate with the usual scale of periodization of European culture. It always remains backward by definition, due to the absence of Western stages of development (the Enlightenment, as an option – the Renaissance, modernity, imperialism and similar historical periods).

Improvisation in Sarah Grand’s New Woman Fiction

Abstract Rationalizing women’s participation in public and political spheres, Sarah Grand sublimates Germaine de Stael’s legacy of woman genius and improvisation in her narratives of New Woman, exp...

Germaine de Stael: A Political Portrait, by Biancamaria Fontana

Biancamaria Fontana seeks to showcase Germaine de Stael’s originality and depth as a political thinker. She makes a convincing case that, despite de Stael’s reputation as a novelist and literary critic, scholars have overlooked the writer’s political ideas. Many have tended to view her political engagement in terms of her biography and to see her ideas as derivative of the men she associated with, especially her father, Jacques Necker, and her friends and lovers, Louis de Narbonne and Benjamin Constant. De Stael’s commitment to political moderation has also probably dissuaded scholars of the French Revolution more intrigued by radicalism than constitutional monarchy. Fontana seeks to remedy this relative neglect by offering a sustained analysis of de Stael’s own political writing during and after the Revolution. The book is organised chronologically; chapters also focus on key political works. It begins in 1791, with what seems to have been de Stael’s first published work of political analysis. It then continues through Napoleon’s ascent to power and de Stael’s subsequent turn to literature, with a final chapter on her posthumously published 1818 reflections on the revolution and hopes for the future.

Un roman sur et pour l'Italie: Une analyse de la réception de Corinne par le monde culturel italien

The purpose of this article is to highlight and discuss the impact of Germaine de Stael's novel Corinne (1807) on early nineteenth-century literary debates in Italy. In particular, this essay intends to investigate the reception of the novel by the Italian intelligentsia in an era of major cultural and political change. Influential in raising national consciousness in Italy, Corinne became widely popular and controversial among Italian hommes de lettres , sparking philosophical and literary debates about the very nature of Italian literature. In this regard, this article devotes particular attention to two eminent literary figures: Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827) and Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837). While the former particularly focuses on the interrelationship of literature and institutions, the latter develops a remarkably fecund intellectual dialogue with Stael's writings, citing Corinne as one of the primary causes of his philosophical conversion. (In French)

A Damned Mob of Corinnes: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Daughters of de Staël

Consider the biography of a typical mid-nineteenth-century American woman writer: Born on the fourth of July, she grew up fatherless, living with her mother and sister in a large, cold household dominated by wealthy uncles. Early on she showed intelligence but not much practical ability, and so eventually her uncles sent her to one of New England's newly-established colleges. She made a few good friends, but seemed to live mostly in her own world. When she returned home with her impractical degree, she retreated to a gloomy attic bedroom, where she settled into a routine of scribbling through the nights, occasionally burning her writings because of her increasingly intense shyness. She wrote a novel based on her college years. A few copies were published, but she was so embarrassed by its publication that she destroyed every copy she could find. After ten years of seclusion, she gradually emerged, anonymously publishing a few delicate stories that won her some encouragement from the literary world. She married late, and shortly after her marriage published a collection of short stories that earned some real critical acclaim. Despite the praise, she continued to belittle her own writing as scribbling. But she was encouraged by her ventures into the public sphere and desperate for money to feed her growing family, and so she tried her hand at another novel. Eventually she would publish four major novels centered on the great issues facing of the era: sexual freedom, family and domestic economy, social reform, and finally a Corinne-themed novel about American artists in Rome. This thumbnail biography uses feminine pronouns to describe the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is a small pronoun switch, but the trick works. Hawthorne's writing career fulfills almost all of the critical commonplaces about nineteenth-century writers, from the decade of lurking in an attic to the rewriting of Germaine de Stael. Does all this imply that Nathaniel Hawthorne considered himself a literary woman? No, probably not. Despite the congruency between Hawthorne's literary career and many nineteenth-century American writers' careers, I am not arguing that Nathaniel Hawthorne should be reclassified as a literary woman. It is not my business to adjudicate the gender identification of a long-dead stranger. Nor is it my intention to shame Hawthorne as a sissy. But I do suggest positioning Nathaniel Hawthorne as a member of the d--d mob of scribbling women who dominated American fiction in the 1850s. When we place Hawthorne's work into a female dominated--or at least female-identified--field of cultural production and read Nathaniel Hawthorne as a participant in a female tradition, many of the questions that are central to Hawthorne scholarship turn sideways. Is Hawthorne's writing Romantic or sentimental? Reactionary or revolutionary? Masculinist or feminist? For this essay, the central question is: Does Nathaniel Hawthorne belong within or outside of the female tradition? Or, to put it more sharply: Was Nathaniel Hawthorne one of the American Corinnes? Although may be somewhat obscure today, according to Ellen Moers, Corinne stands alone ... in its enormous influence upon literary women (174). Since everyone read Corinne, none of the lists quite do justice to the novel's central importance. Nonetheless, Toril Moi offers a partial list: Jane Austen, Mary Godwin Shelley, George Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller (The Yankee Corinna), Kate Chopin--all of them read Corinne, passionately (145). Even readers today who may not be familiar with would recognize some elements of de Stael's plot, which was refracted through so many nineteenth-century novels. is a beautiful, dark-haired romantic genius who declaims her own improvised poetry on the steps of the Capitol in Rome. The crowds cheer and a visiting British aristocrat falls in love with her. …

Feofan Prokopovich’s Pravda voli monarshei as Fundamental Law of the Russian Empire

In Russia, the government is a despotism mitigated by strangulation. This sarcastic definition of constitution, attributed to Germaine de Stael, reflects both contemporary and modern perceptions of 18th-century Russia. (1) An of palace revolutions followed Peter's reign, and between 1725 and 1801 most Russian rulers gained or lost power as the result of palace coups. Three tsars were killed by their successors' supporters: Ivan VI, Peter III, and Paul I. This record of political instability considerably damaged the reputation of the post-Petrine Russian Empire, an age that well-educated Russians began to regard with marked disdain in the late 18th century. (2) Vasilii Kliuchevskii dedicated one of his famous harangues to Peter the Great's unworthy successors: Peter was succeeded by his widow, Catherine I, who was followed by the grandson of the reformer, Peter II, whose successor was Anna, duchess of Courland, the niece of Peter I and daughter of Tsar Ivan, who was succeeded by the infant Ivan Antonovich, son of her niece Anna Leopoldovna of Brunswick, daughter of Catherine Ivanovna, duchess of Mecklenburg, sister of Anna Ioannovna. The overthrown infant Ivan was succeeded by Peter Is daughter, Elizabeth, who was succeeded by her nephew, Peter III, son of Anna Petrovna, duchess of Holstein, who was overthrown by Catherine II. It seems that never before, either here or anywhere else, had the line of succession been fractured so severely. The line was crushed along the way, which led these persons to supreme power. None of them owed their reign to any settlement based on and custom whatsoever, but to hazard, palace revolution, and court intrigue. (3) Why could the Romanovs not simply be a normal hereditary monarchy, like the Habsburgs, Hanoverians, Wittelsbachs, or Bourbons? Kliuchevskii, like most other historians, was convinced that Peter the Great's Law of Succession, signed on 5 February 1722, had caused the mess. (4) According to this law, the tsar gave himself the authority to disinherit his children and freely select his successor, without any regard to blood relationship. (5) Historians have characterized this decision as an act of cultural violence by which Peter demolished customary primogeniture, causing all the trouble that later resulted in the many palace coups. (6) The commonly accepted narrative begins with Tsar Peter the Reformer, who accomplished great things but failed to regulate his own succession, and ends with his great-grandson Paul, who was an incapable ruler but at least bequeathed to the fatherland three sons and a reasonable house law (his 1797 reestablishing a clear-cut line of succession)-in all respects a flourishing dynastic family. It is believed that Peter's decision was the product of particular circumstances regarding his personal relationship to his wayward son Aleksei. (7) Driven by disappointment and fear that his heir apparent would one day destroy his life's work, it is said, Peter made a decision that proved fatally wrong in the long term, for the lack of a clear line of succession hampered the evolution of a constitutional, legal order and of the kinds of institutions that could have facilitated Russia's emancipation from autocracy. Because they were not legal heirs but rather usurpers, Russian tsars felt constrained to base their rule on violence instead of on law. The classical view, most recently defended by Igor' Kurukin, stipulates that the absence of legal norms induced the Guards regiments to make the final decision and, if necessary, carry it out by armed force: might made right. (8) As a consequence, for contemporary observers as for historians, 18th-century Russia temporarily seemed to move toward oriental despotism rather than European enlightened monarchy. (9) For liberal constitutional historians such as Kliuchevskii the failure of dignitaries to select Peter's successor by drawing on regulations of private inheritance was a grave error, one that stripped the succession of a positive legal foundation. …

Fathers, daughters, and slaves: women writers and French colonial slavery

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves brings to life the unique contribution by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. The book enriches our understanding of French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Stael, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. In addition to these now canonical French authors, it calls attention to the lives and works of two lesser-known but important figures—Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the empathy that daughters show toward blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. The works by these French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth and twenty-first century Francophone texts. These women’s contributions allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women’s writing in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism. It undercuts neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies and between nineteenth and twentieth-century Francophone writing.

Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer (review)

Reviewed by: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer Melissa Percival (bio) Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011, 338 pp. $59.95 (cloth). Alexandra Wettlaufer’s book explores the figure of the female artist in France and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, juxtaposing the careers of actual women with representations of female artists in portraiture and the novel. This task requires an awareness of the different working conditions of artists on both sides of the Channel, and also a sensitivity to the varied inflections of artistic representation in different cultural milieux and artistic genres. To her credit, the author mainly keeps this vast, complex territory well under control. In her Introduction, exceedingly well grounded in previous scholarship, she describes how female artists and writers contended with two distinct issues: firstly the patriarchy of the artistic profession, and secondly the masculinist discourse of Romanticism—so anxious about the male artist’s survival that it ruthlessly quelled any notion of female creativity. Against these obstacles, Wettlaufer tells a largely positive story of the struggle by women artists to forge a creative identity in the public sphere. Their achievements, she argues, are not least down to their collective endeavors in affirming a sisterhood of artists. Moreover, she suggests, through the realism and pragmatism with which they approached their task, nineteenth-century women artists provided a compelling counter-model to the self-aggrandizing, dislocated Romantic male artist. Three thematic sections follow on, each neatly comprising three chapters. Part I examines the artist’s studio (actual and represented) as a charged physical space where women forged their careers and negotiated their entry to the sphere of cultural production. Wettlaufer contrasts an eighteenth-century discourse of exceptionality (foregrounded in Mary Sheriff’s work on Louise Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun) where female artists’ endeavors were constructed in terms of isolation and rivalry, with a collective ideal that emerged in the early nineteenth century where female artists’ groups were formed as alternatives to the homosocial cliques of, for example, Jacques-Louis David or the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. More organized French studio practice is contrasted with the informal support networks of the female art scene in Britain. Also stressed is the sisterhood of the arts themselves—the paragone is here gendered as masculine—where female writers and artists mutually supported one another. With reference to paintings [End Page 164] of the studio by artists such as Amélie Cogniet and Mary Ellen Best, Wettlaufer shows how gendered notions of space, objectification and viewing practice were challenged. Two novels are discussed in subsequent chapters. Firstly Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s studio novel, L’atelier d’un peintre, which questions and subverts many gendered tropes of the artist, is read as a “corrective” to the “misognynistic fantasies” of Balzac. Then Anna Mary Howitt’s utopian vision of female solidarity, Sisters in Art, is analyzed with reference to campaigns in Britain for women’s education and professional rights. In Part II, “Cosmopolitan Visions,” links between the female artist and the Other are explored. Chapter 4 includes a comparative reading of Germaine de Stael’s Corinne, ou l’Italie and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, both novels where hierarchies of cultural difference are mapped onto gender hierarchies. The placing so close together of Stael and Owenson throws up some unexpected complexities—which may be more obvious to this English reviewer than to readers from other shores. Namely, it would have been worth exploring Oswald’s “Scottishness.” As a land-owner of English descent, Oswald represents the colonizer of his native Scotland, a land with an unfettered indigenous culture as compelling as that of Ireland or Italy. Class issues subtend this discussion, and one wants to know more about class in relation to other parts of the book. To what extent did the “sisterhood” of artists enable women of all backgrounds, not just those from artistic or privileged milieux, to participate in the sphere of cultural production? “Cosmopolitan Visions” is...

What We Think About When We Think About 'Exile'

This paper will examine the largely under-theorized political phenomenon of exile, specifically as it appears in modern liberal regimes and whether it can be justified. People flee their nations or cities of origin for a number of reasons, but what sets exiles apart from others (refugees, for instance, or economic immigrants) is that their involuntary departure is political in nature.Exile was an accepted feature of the political landscape in ancient Greece and Rome. Early moderns like Machiavelli, as well, accepted exile as a risk associated with political action. When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, he employed exile not only to weaken his political opponents, but also as a method of making other citizens complicit in the punishment of their dissident peers. Germaine De Stael roundly condemns exile as cruel and barbaric, while her friend Benjamin Constant considers the possibility that given the proper procedures, political expulsion could be a legitimate tool of the sovereign power. In the present-day, political expulsion persists, although its political nature is often cloaked in bureaucratic language.

Germaine de Stael: Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu

Germaine de Stael: Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu

Men with Muskets, Women with Lyres: Nationality, Citizenship, and Gender in the Writings of Germaine de Staël

On 23 May 1812 Germaine de Stael (1766-1817), Europe's best-known enemy of Napoleon Bonaparte, set out from her estate on Lake Geneva to escape to England. In her reminiscences, she reflected on the pivotal event as follows:[A]fter ten years of ever-increasing persecutions [. . .] I was obliged to leave two homelands as a fugitive, Switzerland and France, by order of a man less French than I. For I was born on the banks of the Seine, where his only claim to citizenship is his tyranny. He saw the light of day on the island of Corsica, practically within Africa's savage sway. His father did not, like mine, devote his fortune and his sleepless nights to defending France from bankruptcy and famine; the air of this beautiful country is not his native air; how can he understand the pain of being exiled from it, when he considers this fertile land only as the instrument of his victories. Where is his patrie? It is any country that accepts his domination. His fellow-citizens? They are whatever slaves obey his orders.1In this passage, de Stael deliberately links nationality and citizenship. In her view, citizenship status was acquired simply by being born on French soil. Her family's tireless labors on behalf of the nation added another irrefutable proof of Frenchness. In addition, growing up in France and breathing the country's invigorating air had created an emotional attachment that a person raised elsewhere simply could not fathom. We thus have a triad of birth/service/sentiment that connects the deserving individual to his or her nation (in this case la grande nation).In this essay I explore de Stael's understanding of the twin concepts of nationality and citizenship through the lens of gender. Nationality and citizenship were of perennial concern to her thought, partly because of the turbulent times she lived in, partly because of her personal experience in exile. Influenced by history and literature, she early on admired the gallant men with muskets who heroically sacrificed their lives for the glory of the nation. But it was the exceptional women with lyres who were destined to act as the nation's unifying agents by recreating the gallants' deeds in writing. By imagining the nation these women fulfilled the supreme task of citizenship. In what follows I will argue that de Stael conceived of the ideal citizen as a woman writer or artist who served her nation by inspiring its members with enthusiasm and virtue.2 In elaborating her view of the superior woman as citoyenne and national muse she made an important contribution to the debate on the nation and the citizen.The only daughter of Louis XVI's finance minister Jacques Necker and the salonniere Suzanne Curchod-Necker, of Genevan and Vaudois citizenship respectively, de Stael gained fame and notoriety through her brilliant conversational talents, political intrigues, and unconventional relationships with famous men. Though she considered herself a true Frenchwoman (veritable francaise),3 she was a citizen of Geneva and a Swedish subject by marriage, at least until 1803 when she took advantage of the Code Civil and officially claimed French citizenship.4 Considering this multiplicity of conflicting loyalties, it is not surprising that her major writings reveal a sustained preoccupation with these issues.Despite their undeniable significance for early nineteenth -century European intellectual history, historians have so far devoted scant attention to de Stael's writings. In fact, in the US, Staelien studies have largely been dominated by literary criticism and theory.5 This has had the effect of prioritizing her novels over her non-fiction, downplaying the historical context of her oeuvre and, most grievously, ignoring de Stael's historical contribution to socio-political thought.6 As a result of the complex ways in which her personal experience informed her writing, her oeuvre is best examined as a unified, though certainly inconsistent, whole. …

Neither Public nor Private: The Domestic Sphere in French Enlightenment Thought

Neither Public nor Private: The Domestic Sphere in French Enlightenment ThoughtFor the last twenty years or so there has been a burgeoning interest in the contribution of women to the cultural life of the ancien regime. Much of the groundbreaking research has been done by scholars who have argued for the importance of gender as both a historical as well as analytical category.1 In addition to reshaping the boundaries separating historical and theoretical research, scholarship has also underscored the attendant methodological difficulties in combining the two. At the risk of simplification, one can say that historians have tended to privilege empirical evidence of women's activity while literary and cultural critics have focused on the cultural value of key women writers and artists.2Lesley H. Walker's A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France (Bucknell, 2008) intervenes on both sides of the issue. Tracing the emergence of a discourse centered on an idealized mother figure, Walker aims to historicize our current notions of feminine virtue which she views as bound up in a modernist narrative of emarrcipation. By arguing for the importance of the domestic sphere in the development of an enlightened society based on greater justice and equality, Walker's goal is to recuperate an alternative picture of female virtue. This is one in which maternal solicitude, and rejection of the public sphere in favor of private virtue, are key factors to overall social reform. Walker convincingly shows that the domestic sphere cannot be reduced to the distinctions between public and private spheres, since domestic reform was considered an essential component in the creation of an enlightened community. In so doing she argues against the traditional narrative, which has typically cast the domestic sphere as the place where women have been 'repressed,' 'silenced,' 'marginalized/ and 'domesticated' (18). In this sense, her book rejoins Carla Hesse's recent claim that radical scholarship, by focusing on the exclusion of women from the public sphere, has underestimated the cultural contributions of women who saw themselves as working within the liberal enlightenment tradition.3Walker's evaluation of the domestic sphere is motivated by two observations. First, that scholarship, while opening up new areas of research, has tended to privilege visionary personalities such as Olympe de Gouges or public figures such as Germaine de Stael to the detriment of those female writers and artists who cleaved more closely to the century's own understanding of feminine virtue. Second, that the contemporary theoretical interest in the psychodynamics of the bourgeois nuclear family, especially as developed by Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition, has its roots in an eighteenthcentury valorization of domestic life whose historical specificity has been subsequently forgotten. Unlike Freud's narrative that is predicated on an absent mother, Walker shows how eighteenth-century idealizations of the loving family stressed the presence pf an (often) all-seeing, self-sacrificing mother and the virtual absence of the as a viable love object (35). Although not all readers will accept her characterization of affectionate mother-daughter relations as homo-erotic, Walker's suggestion that the eighteenth century viewed heterosexual love between husband and wife as an unsustainable norm even as it privileged an idealized domestic life is an interesting one. For it suggests that the domestic sphere functioned as a space of freedom for women even as it constrained them in other ways.Subsumed under these general goals is a further concern: to introduce the reader to key women writers and artists in order to expand our understanding of what constitutes a feminist canon. In addition to analyzing the works of such well-known figures as Marie-Jeanne Roland, de Stael, Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun, and Stephanie-Felicite de Genlis, Walker also treats lesser-known figures such as the prolific writer and journalist Jeanne-Marie Ie Prince de Beaumont and the painter and engraver Marguerite Gerard, sister-in-law of Jean-Honore Fragonard. …

Book Review, Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns

This book review considers Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson's argument that there is less of an intrinsic tension between liberalism and republicanism than has been claimed by various students of the history of modern liberal thought. It fully endorses the authors' directing of our attention to the mode of thinking which is to be seen in their select group of subjects (Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Germaine de Stael and Benjamin Constant). But it balks at their claim that their 'critical junctures' or 'heterogeneous and relational' interpretation of the rise of liberalism is superior to the 'linear' or 'trickle down' approach which sees this rise as a tale of the progressively strengthening influence of the 'giants' of political thought such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Montesquieu et. al. over lesser thinkers who were more absorbed in 'practical affairs.' The suggestion is made that what the authors take to be 'negotiable' differences of emphasis between the classically liberal and classically republican traditions may in fact be 'existential' oppositions which no single political order could overcome.

Liberal beginnings: making a republic for the moderns

The book examines the origins and development of the modern liberal tradition and explores the relationship between republicanism and liberalism between 1750 and 1830. The authors consider the diverse settings of Scotland, the American colonies, the new United States, and France and examine the writings of six leading thinkers of this period: Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Germaine de Stael, and Benjamin Constant. The book traces the process by which these thinkers transformed and advanced the republican project, both from within and by introducing new elements from without. Without compromising civic principles or abandoning republican language, they came to see that unrevised, the republican tradition could not grapple successfully with the political problems of their time. By investing new meanings, arguments, and justifications into existing republican ideas and political forms, these innovators fashioned a doctrine for a modern republic, the core of which was surprisingly liberal.

Faustus: from the German of Goethe

Introduction 1. The Faustus of Goethe, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Boosey, 1821). With the 27 illustrations by Moritz Retzsch, re-engraved by Henry Moses. 2. Germaine de Stael, Germany [= de l'Allemagne, 1809], translated by Francis Hodgson, edited by William Lamb (London: John Murray, 1813). Part II 'On Literature and the Arts', Ch. 23, 'Faustus', pp. 181-226. 3. Extracts from Gothe's Tragedy of Faustus, explanatory of the plates by Retsch, translated by George Soane (London: Bohte, 1820). [January 1820] Page proofs for Bohte's planned second edition, translated by George Soane. [Sent to London Magazine, Nov 1821 to Goethe June 1822] 4. Retsch's Series of Twenty-six Outlines Illustrative of Goethe's Tragedy of Faust, translated by Daniel Boileau (London: Boosey, 1820). [June 1820], with Boileau's notes to Abraham Hayward's prose translation. 5. 'The Faustus of Goethe', translated by John Anster, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 7. no. 39 (June 1820), 235-258. 6. Faust: a Drama by Goethe and, Schiller's Song of the Bell, translated by Lord Francis Leveson Gower. (London: John Murray, 1823). [corresponding text only] Stylometric Analysis of the Faust Translations, Chronology Bibliography Index

Traveling Pleasures and Perils of Sensibility

philosophical investment in pleasures of sympathy--especially if represented as contagious--provides a continuity between traditions of Sensibility and of Romanticism. To illustrate, I pair two blockbusters of first decade of nineteenth-century, Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806) and Germaine de Stael's Corinne, or Italy (1807). Together they offer a perspective on moments of cultural encounter, on pleasures and perils of Sensibility that animate cultural polities of both works. Both novels function partly as travel books introducing intense, destabilizing pleasures of foreign locales, customs, and traditions to critique domestic political circumstances. But for these women writers (and in different ways for female protagonists at center of novels) notion of home is vexed itself. Tensions produced by distance, displacement, discomfort, and sometimes even by divided allegiance, add complexity to subtle and implicit nationalist critique their narratives enable. Owenson conveys her competing allegiances to Ireland and England after Union of 1800 both through marriage plot uniting characters and nations in conclusion to Wild Irish Girl and in her insistent equation of national with natural, especially for natives of wild western region of Connaught. De Stael's familiar homelessness, constantly displaced by Napoleon's dictates of exile, is reflected by a geographically diverse and thorough immersion in Italian landscape and culture, past and present. Both novels distrust excesses of nationalism while imagining cross-cultural love relationships animated by extreme states of sympathetic attachment to people, places, and objects that are master tropes of Sensibility. Ultimately, pleasure in both novels engenders a volatile notion of history that embraces pleasures of historical change and transcends its inevitable pains. Owenson's embrace of futurity in a revolutionary era in contrast with de Stael's fatalism distinguishes two novels. In literature of Sensibility, electric charge of human contact provides more than simple pleasure. Moments of literal contact arouse one's own physiology and sensitivity to other beings: hence, fellow-feeling. Such moments of imagined sociability follow from a heightened ethical imperative to connect with others, often at one's own peril. Typically, in a Sternean mode, touching scenes in Wild Irish Girl foreground eroticized benevolence between characters which Owenson frames with Gaelic symbolic significance. For example, when fingers of hero and heroine accidentally meet on harp Glorvina is playing, Horatio comments, The touch circulated like electricity through every vein, breeding (Owenson 66). Both trope of circulation and unaccountable emotion protagonist experiences (while assuming it is shared by both parties) express Sensibility tradition. This excitement is less than utter delirium of an earlier scene, but beyond power of words--a commonplace of eighteenth-century tradition that, would be retooled through Romantic versions of sublime. This interchange is also significant in introducing a key interruption in narrative, an extended chain of footnoted material which discusses antiquity of harp and distinctive Gaelic tradition of itinerant bard, while citing Percy's Reliques, introducing Brian Boru and Cambrensis, and drawing (as notes so often do) on author's personal experience of Ireland--the author as native informant. specific linkage of Gaelic culture with tradition of Sensibility provides a necessary corrective to critical narratives that root Sensibility within a primarily British cultural framework, while nodding to French and German influences. As several critics have noted, this reduction ignores increasing identification of Sensibility with the Celtic fringe (Eagleton; Alliston). …

The empire of stereotypes: Germaine de Stael and the idea of Italy

The empire of stereotypes: Germaine de Stael and the idea of Italy

La réception de Sieyès par la doctrine publiciste française du XIXème et du XXème siècles

Before being recognized as the author of the theory of the national sovereignty, Sieyes was known as the author of the theory of the limited sovereignty. Those lawyers of the Group of Coppet (particularly Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Stael) were very influenced by his political thought. But this influence can also be found in the 1900 year doctrine, when he is finally conceived as one of the fathers of the liberal school, and an heir of Montesquieu. The French doctrine of Public Law in the 1900 years, tried to show Sieyes as the main author of the national sovereignty theory, and has recognized the real dimension of his thought through the theories of representation and constituent power. Submission date: 17/11/2004 Acceptance date: 23/01/2005

Suzanne Necker's Legacy: Breastfeeding as Metonym in Germaine de Staël's Delphine

The sole treatment of maternal nursing in her fiction makes a surprising entry into the later stages of Germaine de Stael’s long epistolary novel Delphine (Geneva, 1802). What explains its unexpected appearance and its resonance within the novel? Perhaps Stael’s own family history— particularly her mother’s experiences of birth and nursing her daughter at the breast— may help answer the question, and that history is recorded in her mother’s published correspondence. Suzanne Necker’s treatment of birth and nursing in these letters in turn provokes scrutiny of a number of little-explored issues surrounding the impact of conceptions of maternity on French women. If we recognize the clash between conflicting conceptions of mothering, namely an older “cultural” model coming to grips with the ostensible “natural” one proposed by the “new” maternalists of the mid-eighteenth century, how do we see this conflict played out?1 What was the nature of the pressures exerted on women to embrace the vogue of the maternal bond in the last half of the eighteenth century? What maternal style did Germaine’s mother adopt, and what relation did it bear to evolving ideas concerning maternity around her? For what variety of ideas of motherhood did the breast serve as metonym? Along with the family story of her infancy, what did ambient ideas concerning breastfeeding contribute to Germaine de Stael’s