Fiction of Enlightenment

"This book argues that women authors of the French eighteenth century claimed reason and contributed to Enlightenment. It begins by framing the Enlightenment as fiction, in two senses: first, what passes under the name of Enlightenment in much current critical discourse is a fiction, or a caricatured construct; second, works of fiction can illuminate Enlightenment. The book offers fresh readings of texts by the three most prominent women among eighteenth-century writers in French: Francoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charrière. These authors challenged the widely held idea that women's reason was inferior to men's. Literary forms--novels, stories, plays, essays, and letters--allowed these authors to approach the question of reason in particularly nuanced ways. Faithful to the eighteenth century, this project is also relevant to the twenty-first."--Jacket.