Women's travel writing [ Reading & Writing / Mobility ]
… can produce an ‘imagined community’ in which reading women can exercise their Christian sociable skills, on the model of tea-table assemblies, an idealised form of communal sociability later to be echoed in Adam Smith’s concept of ‘harmony … most essential service, I presume, that authors could render to society, would be to promote inquiry and discussion, instead of making those dogmatical assertions which only appear to gird the human mind round with imaginary circles […]. … every bosom beat high with admiration, when every heart throbbed with enthusiastic transport, when every eye melted into tears.’ 12 Polluted by perverted power (the ‘vulgar despots’, the ‘revolutionary commissaries’, the ‘spies of the …
Education | French Revolution | Travel | Women
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