Sentiment and sentimental education are central themes in French novels of the 18th century. However, what do these fictions really say about the art and practice of love? What part should the emotions--or the intellect--play in sexual relationships? Will the lover find fulfillment in sophisticated urban society, or in the natural world? Is a man's approach different from a woman's? This study looks at these questions and tracks the pursuit of eros through such works as Crébillon's Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit, Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Diderot's La Religieuse, and Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Goodden considers the interplay between love and friendship, the portrayal of beauty, and the rhetoric of passion, to show that the dual character of the 18th century is reflected in the lover who becomes complete by allowing reason to guide sentiment.

The Complete Lover: Eros, Nature, and Artifice in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel

Goodden, Angelica

Literature & Fiction

Oxford University Press

In 18th-century France an intellectual battle was fought to raise the professional status of acting to the level of other arts involving rhetoric and expressive technique. The central strategy was based on the ancient rhetorical notion of actio, a theory of gesture, attitude, and facial expression already employed in the teaching and practice of religious, forensic, and political oratory. In this lucid study, Goodden explores the belief, championed by Diderot and others, that the primary mode of persuasion is not auditory, but visual.

Actio and Persuasion: Dramatic Performance in Eighteenth-Century France

Reference

English as a Second Language

How does exile beget writing, and writing exile? What kind of writing can both be fuelled by absence and prolong it? Exile, which was meant to imprison her, paradoxically gave Madame de Staël a freedom that enabled her to be as active a dissident as any woman in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was capable of being. Repeatedly banished for her nonconformism, she felt she had been made to suffer twice over, first for political daring and then for daring, as a woman, to be political (a particularly grave offence in the eyes of the misogynist Napoleon). Yet her outspokenness - in novels, comparative literary studies, and works of political and social theory - made her seem as much a threat outside her beloved France as within it, while her friendship with statesmen, soldiers, and literary figures such as Byron, Fanny Burney, Goethe, and Schiller simply added to her dangerous celebrity. She preached the virtues of liberalism and freedom wherever she went, turning the experiences of her enforced absence into an arsenal to use against all who tried to suppress her. Even Napoleon, perhaps her greatest foe, conceded, from his own exile on St Helena that she would last. Her unremitting activity as a speaker and writer made her into precisely the sort of activist no woman at that time was permitted to be; yet she paradoxically remained a reluctant feminist, seeming even to connive at the inferior status society granted her sex at the same time as vociferously challenging it, and remaining torn by the conflicting demands of public and private life.

Madame de Staël: The Dangerous Exile

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Born in 1755, the daughter of a portraitist and a former hairdresser, Vigee Le Brun triumphed over institutional prejudice to make a career as Marie-Antoinette's favourite portraitist and the painter-confidante of royalty all over Europe. Her connections in Parisian high society made the revolution dangerous for her, and after the fall of the Bastille she fled France both to save her own skin and to go on painting beautiful women and powerful men. Her wandering, cosmopolitan life took her to Bourbon Naples, Habsburg Vienna, imperial St Petersburg and Georgian London, and wherever she went she attracted attention for her alluring portraits. Vigee Le Brun, in both her personal and her public life, was a woman of contradictions. A revolutionary female artist, she was a political reactionary who yearned for what she saw as the lost paradise of France before the revolution. A proud and independent woman, she raised her daughter single-handedly, only tragically to lose her affection. Angelica Goodden's illuminating account of this extraordinary woman - the first biography of the artist in English for seventy-five years - is also a vivid portrait of an age of society scandal and political turmoil. Drawing on contemporary records and Vigee Le Brun's own fascinating memoirs, Goodden brings to life the remarkable range of friends and acquaintances the artist made through her work, from Catherine the Great and Madame de Stael to Emma Hamilton, whose suggestive portrait won Vigee Le Brun some notoriety. As her art regains favour, this definitive biography is a long-overdue reassessment of this sometimes scandalous, often devious but prodigiously gifted woman.

Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Louise Le Brun

Chameleon

How does exile beget writing, and writing exile? What kind of writing can both be fuelled by absence and prolong it? Exile, which was meant to imprison her, paradoxically gave Madame de Stael a freedom that enabled her to be as active a dissident as any woman in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was capable of being. Repeatedly banished for her nonconformism, she felt she had been made to suffer twice over, first for political daring and then for daring, as a woman, to be political (a particularly grave offence in the eyes of the misogynist Napoleon). Yet her outspokenness - in novels, comparative literary studies, and works of political and social theory - made her seem as much a threat outside her beloved France as within it, while her friendship with statesmen, soldiers, and literary figures such as Byron, Fanny Burney, Goethe, and Schiller simply added to her dangerous celebrity. She preached the virtues of liberalism and freedom wherever she went, turning the experiences of her enforced absence into an arsenal to use against all who tried to suppress her. Even Napoleon, perhaps her greatest foe, conceded, from his own exile on St Helena that she would last. Her unremitting activity as a speaker and writer made her into precisely the sort of activist no woman at that time was permitted to be; yet she paradoxically remained a reluctant feminist, seeming even to connive at the inferior status society granted her sex at the same time as vociferously challenging it, and remaining torn by the conflicting demands of public and private life.

Madame de Staël: Delphine & Corinne (Critical Guides to French Texts)

History & Criticism

Foyles

One of the most successful women artists in history, Angelica Kauffman became the toast of Georgian England, captivating society with her portraits, mythological scenes, and decorative compositions. She knew and painted poets, novelists and playwrights, collaborating with them and illustrating their work; her designs adorned the houses of the Grand Tourists she had met in Italy; actors, statesmen, philosophers, kings and queen sat to her; and she was the force that launched a thousand engravings. Despite rumors of relationships with other artists and an apparently bigamous and annulled first marriage to a pseudo Count, Kauffman was adopted by royalty in England and abroad as a model of social and artistic decorum. Kauffman's life and work is full of apparent contradictions explored in this first biography in over 80 years.

Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman

History

RANDOM HOUSE UK

One of the most successful women artists in history, Angelica Kauffman became the toast of Georgian England, captivating society with her portraits, mythological scenes, and decorative compositions. She knew and painted poets, novelists and playwrights, collaborating with them and illustrating their work; her designs adorned the houses of the Grand Tourists she had met in Italy; actors, statesmen, philosophers, kings and queen sat to her; and she was the force that launched a thousand engravings. Despite rumors of relationships with other artists and an apparently bigamous and annulled first marriage to a pseudo Count, Kauffman was adopted by royalty in England and abroad as a model of social and artistic decorum. Kauffman's life and work is full of apparent contradictions explored in this first biography in over 80 years.

Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman, Eighteenth-Century Icon

Arts & Photography

Pimlico

Diderot's lifelong preoccupation with the body is expressed in every aspect of his work - philosophical, ethical, emotional, psychological, aesthetic and literary. Even when discussing bodies at the highest level of abstraction, he still focuses on them as material entities above all; this concern with tangible realities gives his writing its celebrated correctness and human appeal. In her original and illuminating study , Goodden deals with Diderot's views on the body-mind relationship, anatomical matters, ethical extensions of the body, the expressive, the sensual and the sexual body, drawing evidence from his scientific and philosophical writings, fiction, art criticism, dramatic works and correspondance.

Diderot and the Body (Legenda Main Series)

Routledge

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