Women's utopias of the eighteenth century
"No human society has ever been perfect, a fact that has led thinkers from Plato onward to conceive of utopias both as a fanciful means of escape from an imperfect reality and as a useful tool with which to design improvements upon it." "The most studied utopias have been proposed by men, but during the eighteenth century a group of reform-oriented female authors put forth a series of works that expressed their views of, and their reservations about, ideal societies. In Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century Alessa Johns examines the utopian communities envisaged by Mary Astell, Sarah Fielding, Mary Hamilton, Sarah Scott, and other writers from Britain and continental Europe, uncovering the ways in which they resembled - and departed from - traditional utopias."--Jacket
History
xi, 212 pages ; 24 cm
9780252028410, 0252028414
50773262
Part 1: defining feminist utopianism
Mary Astell's "excited needles": imitation, circulation, and a theory of feminist utopia
Feminist utopia and the new commercialism
Part 2: women's utopian visions
Sarah Fielding: ideal readers and utopian commerce
Reconceiving the contract: Sarah Scott's self-replicating utopia
Mary Hamilton: plagiarizing utopia
Reproducing utopia beyond Britain: Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont's The new Clarissa and Sophie von La Roche's Events at Lake Oneida
Afterword: a middle way
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