Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T14:40:03.026Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics. By Wendy Gunther-Canada. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. 224p. $38.00

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2002

Gina Luria Walker
Affiliation:
The New School

Extract

This is a brave, important book that identifies and responds to the black holes between scholarly discourses and across genres to explain why and how Mary Wollstonecraft's texts should be recognized as “interrupting the fraternal conversation of political thought” (p. 42) among the men she herself described as “canonized forefathers.” Reading carefully through selections from Wollstonecraft's writings—letters, educational treatises, novels, the Vindications—Wendy Gunther-Canada elucidates the continuum of Wollstonecraft's radical political theory about gender differences. Rebel Writer traces Wollstonecraft's transformation from “arguably the eighteenth century's most rebellious female reader [to] its most revolutionary feminist author,” as she contested the portrayal of women in Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, Fordyce, and Gregory, struggling to devise a feminism characterized by “the powerful confrontations between woman and the word, between literature and philosophy” (p. 16).

Type
Book Review
Copyright
2002 by the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.