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Book Synopsis

Argues that women''s relationship to books and their promotion of reading contributed greatly to the cultural and intellectual vitality of the Enlightenment.

2005 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that surrounded women''s reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances, short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women. Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in women''s work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create new kinds of responsible and not merely responsive readers, and an integral part of the conviction that domestic reading does not have to be trivial.

Through the Reading Glass Women Books and Sex in

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    A Hardback by Suellen Diaconoff

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      Publisher: State University Press of New York (SUNY)
      Publication Date: 4/28/2005 12:00:00 AM
      ISBN13: 9780791464212, 978-0791464212
      ISBN10: 0791464210

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      Argues that women''s relationship to books and their promotion of reading contributed greatly to the cultural and intellectual vitality of the Enlightenment.

      2005 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

      Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that surrounded women''s reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances, short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women. Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in women''s work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create new kinds of responsible and not merely responsive readers, and an integral part of the conviction that domestic reading does not have to be trivial.

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