PROJECTS
Habilitation: “Sharing Wor(l)ds: Cosmopolitanism and Utopian Vision” (working title)
In my present project (right now at embryonic stage), I wish to explore the relationship between cosmopolitanism and the utopian vision, the dialogue between national and foreign bodies, interfaith and interracial communities. The Scottish Enlightenment, Kant's thought, Gustave Tarde's and Mikhail Bakhtin's work are parts of the material I draw on for this project.
Annotated edition of Frances Brooke's The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (Pickering and Chatto, 2012)
Engaging with several political and aesthetic issues of the day, Julia Mandeville considers forms of education, prescriptive gender roles and the institution of marriage. The novel is written in the epistolary form and contains seventy-seven letters, written predominantly by the witty widow, Lady Anne Wilmot and by the hero of the novel, Harry Mandeville. Although some critics saw it as a sentimental novel, it responds to and critiques the genre, displaying the influence of Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and Julie (1761) and Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). www.pickeringchatto.com/mandeville
Collection of essays on Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Rodopi, 2012)
Rodopi Press Amsterdam/ Atlanta announces a new series of literary studies entitled Dialogue under the general editorship of Michael J. Meyer. The series will offer new and experienced scholars the opportunity to present alternative readings and approaches to classic texts (those which have received canonical acceptance in either American or Continental Literature). As the guest editor for the volume on Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of The Rights of Woman, I have developed a list of different topics and approaches that have elicited in the past a significant level of disagreement among critics.
Previous
My dissertation pondered Jane Austen’s contribution to the debates of women’s rights in late-eighteenth-century Britain. The focus lies upon Austen’s approach to moral development and its gender implications in a rising commercial society that she and her contemporaries identify as “civilization.” The 1800s signal the emergence of the cult of the self-made man, which women writers counter in novels and political tracts as they pursue the remaking of womanhood.
In a time when the quest for economic independence and the colonial project opened unknown avenues; when the French Revolution inspired the sons to question the rights of the fathers, as much as it led subjects to challenge the power of monarchs; when Romanticism cheered the individual as a completely self-sufficient entity, women began to reflect not only upon their station in society but also upon their contribution to the ongoing social changes. While the highest goal of the rising civil society was self-realization through independence and individual enterprise, how could women connected as they were (and are) to human beings as mothers, daughters and wives fit in the new mold?
This study argues that Jane Austen’s novels call for concepts of moral autonomy which accommodate human connectdness, thus heralding recent sociogenetic investigations and feminist research. The reevaluation of connectedness and domestic affections resists a social division between public and private spheres that delegates to the backstage those activities performed traditionally by women: child-rearing, caring for the sick and elderly. It opposes the idea of public men and private women.