Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot

by Rita Goldberg

• ISBN13: 9780521129886
• ISBN10: 0521129885
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Dr Goldberg argues that Samuel Richardson had expressed a powerful and hitherto unperceived sexual mythology in Clarissa, making it the popular masterpiece it quickly became. There had never before been a work of literature in which the rape of a woman became the moral indictment of an age. Clarissa was a book which changed minds. It is not surprising that Diderot, the French philosophe, drew on Richardson as the inspiration for his own novel, La Religieuse. Richardson's novels had achieved Diderot's declared aim as editor of the great Encyclopèdie: to change the way people think. For both writers it had become clear that the boudoir had replaced the Puritan closet and the Catholic confessional as the location for tests of virtue. Dr Goldberg offers an original, comparative reading of the works of these French and English innovators. She leaves us in little doubt that our understanding of what it means to be a woman in our culture owes much to the turbulent world of Richardson and Diderot.

Table of Contents

Preface

A note on the texts

Introduction

Clarissa and the Puritan conduct books

The moral struggle at Harlowe Place

'Clarissa lives: LET THIS EXPIATE!'

Diderot's Ãëloge de Richardson and the problem of realism

Sex and the philosophe

La Religieuse and Clarissa: convent and bordello

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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