Mary Wollstonecraft in Context

Literature in Context

by Nancy E. Johnson (Editor), Paul Keen (Editor)

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was one of the most influential and controversial women of her age. No writer, except perhaps her political foe, Edmund Burke, and her fellow reformer, Thomas Paine, inspired more intense reactions. In her brief literary career before her untimely death in 1797, Wollstonecraft achieved remarkable success in an unusually wide range of genres: from education tracts and political polemics, to novels and travel writing. Just as impressive as her expansive range was the profound evolution of her thinking in the decade when she flourished as an author. In this collection of essays, leading international scholars reveal the intricate biographical, critical, cultural, and historical context crucial for understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's oeuvre. Chapters on British radicalism and conservatism, French philosophes and English Dissenters, constitutional law and domestic law, sentimental literature, eighteenth-century periodicals and more elucidate Wollstonecraft's social and political thought, historical writings, moral tales for children, and novels.

390 pages, Hardcover

Published March 12, 2020

About the author

Nancy E. Johnson is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches eighteenth-century literature and literary theory. She has published on British novels and legal theory in the 1790s, narratives and the London treason trials of 1794, and Adam Smith's use of narrative in his lectures on jurisprudence. She is currently researching women's concepts of justice in the eighteenth century.