Synopses & Reviews
Written during a time of great political turmoil, social anxiety, and against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft"s argument continues to challenge and inspire. This revised and expanded Third Edition is again based on the 1792 second-edition text and is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations.
'Backgrounds and Contexts' is also significantly expanded and contains twenty-four works organized thematically into these groupings: 'Legacies of English Radicalism,' 'Education,' 'Wollstonecraft"s Revolutionary Moment,' and 'The Wollstonecraft Debate.' Opinions on a variety of reforms that may be compared and contrasted with Wollstonecraft"s include those by John Milton, John Locke, Mary Astell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hannah More, Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin, among others.
'Criticism' includes six seminal essays on A Vindication of the Rights of Womanby Elissa S. Guralnick, Mitzi Myers, Cora Kaplan, Mary Poovey, Claudia L. Johnson, and Barbara Taylor.
A Chronology of Wollstonecraft"s life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.
Synopsis
The First Edition of this Norton Critical Edition was both an acclaimed classroom text and ahead of its time. This Second Edition offers the best in Wollstonecraft scholarship and criticism since 1976, providing the ideal means for studying the first feminist document written in English.
Synopsis
The text of the work remains that of Wollstonecraft's second edition of 1792, for scholarship has vindicated that choice. The annotations have been greatly expanded. Backgrounds documents more fully the early concern for women's education, with important extracts from the relevant works of John Locke and Mary Astell, as well as three more of Catherine Macaulay's influential "Letters on Education." A new section, The Wollstonecraft Debate, provides a wide spectrum of opinions about the woman herself, from the nastiness of Richard Polwhele to the adulation of William Blake, balanced by the cool intelligence of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Criticism contains essays by Emma Rauschenbusch-Clough, Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, R. M. Janes, Elissa S. Guralnick, Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd, Mitzi Myers, and Mary Poovey. A Chronology of Wollstonecraft's life and a Selected Bibliography are also included.
About the Author
Mary Wollstonecraft(1759'"1797) first achieved fame for her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792), in which she extended the radical idea of the "rights of man" to women and laid the groundwork for modern feminism.Deidre Shauna Lynchis Chancellor Jackman Professor and Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Economy of Character, which was awarded the MLA"s Prize for a First Book, and editor of Janeites: Austen"s Disciples and Devoteesand, with William B. Warner, Cultural Institutions of the Novel. She is also an editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, of the State University of New York Chancellor"s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and of the Northeast Association of Graduate Schools" Graduate Faculty Teaching Award.