Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A Sourcebook / Edition 1

by Adriana Craciun

Overview

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the founding text of modern feminism. In this sourcebook, Adriana Craciun provides the ideal starting point for students new to Wollstonecraft's revolutionary work, providing carefully focused introductory materials combined with reprinted and newly annotated source documents.
Key materials in this sourcebook include:
*letters by Wollstonecraft and important contemporary documents
*nineteenth-century responses to the text
*twentieth-century critical readings
*annotated key passages, cross-referenced to critical texts
*suggestions for further reading.
This is the essential guide to a key literary and political text.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415227353
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/25/2002
Series:	Routledge Guides to Literature
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Adriana Craciun lectures at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the editor of Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor(1997), co-editor of Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and The French Revolution (2001) and author of the forthcoming Fatal Women of Romanticism (2002).

Table of Contents

	Series Editor's Preface	xii
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Introduction	1
1	Contexts
	Contextual Overview	7
	Chronology	12
	Contemporary Documents	17
	Sources of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	17
	from Emile, or On Education (1762)	17
	Letters on Education (1790)	22
	Letters by Wollstonecraft	23
	To Catharine Macaulay Graham, 1790, on women	23
	To Mary Hays, 1792, on publishing	24
	To Gilbert Imlay, 1794, on imagination	25
	To Gilbert Imlay, 1795, on sex and sentiment	27
	To William Godwin, 1796, on her writing	28
	To Amelia Alderson (Opie), 1797, on marriage	29
2	Interpretations
	Critical History	33
	Nineteenth-Century Responses	39
	Romantic-Period Responses and Reviews	39
	Review of Rights of Woman in Monthly Review (1792)	39
	A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792)	40
	"The Rights of Woman" (comp. c.1792, pub. 1825)	41
	Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)	42
	The Unsex'd Females (1798)	44
	Review of Godwin's Memoirs, Anti-Jacobin Review (1798)	46
	A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799)	47
	Letters from the Mountains (1807)	48
	"Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft" (1800)	49
	"Mary" (1801-5)	50
	A Defence of the Character and Conduct of the Late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1803)	52
	"Mary Wollstonecraft," The Sexagenarian (1818)	53
	Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century Responses	54
	"Fragment of an 'Essay on Woman'" (c.1821)	54
	"Mary Wollstonecraft," The English Republic (1854)	55
	Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (1877)	56
	"Mary Wollstonecraft," New Quarterly Magazine (1878)	57
	"Introduction to the New Edition" of Rights of Woman (1890)	58
	"Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom" (1911)	59
	"Mary Wollstonecraft," The Second Common Reader (1932)	60
	Twentieth-Century Responses	62
	Wollstonecraft's Political and Social Arguments	62
	Wollstonecraft's Dilemma: Equality vs. Difference	62
	Wollstonecraft and Liberal Individualism	63
	Wollstonecraft and Separate-Spheres Ideology	65
	Wollstonecraft and Sensibility	67
	Wollstonecraft and Slavery	69
	Wollstonecraft and Religion	71
	Wollstonecraft and Nationalism	73
	Wollstonecraft on the Body and Sexuality	75
	Wollstonecraft and Self-Control	75
	Wollstonecraft and Sexuality	76
	Wollstonecraft and (Anti)Commercialism	77
	Wollstonecraft and Sexual Distinction	79
	Wollstonecraft and Physical Abuse	80
	Wollstonecraft and Physical Strength	82
	Wollstonecraft and Literary Traditions	84
	Wollstonecraft's Early Reception	84
	Wollstonecraft as Literary Critic	86
	Wollstonecraft's Discourse	88
	Wollstonecraft and Imagination	90
3	Key Passages
	Introduction	95
	Key Passages of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	101
	Hints	161
4	Further Reading
	Recommended Editions of Wollstonecraft	167
	Recommended Book-Length Studies of Wollstonecraft	168
	Further Reading	169
	Index	173