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.
- ISBN10 0791464229
- ISBN13 9780791464229
- Publish Date 1 June 2006 (first published 28 April 2005)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint State University of New York Press
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 276
- Language English