P N Furbank

The publication of the 44-volume Works of Daniel Defoe continues with this collection of Defoe's satirical poetry and fantasy writings, and writings on the supernatural.

The publication of the 44-volume Works of Daniel Defoe continues with this collection of Defoe's satirical poetry and fantasy writings, and writings on the supernatural.

In the later months of 1874, the great French poet, Stephane Mallarme, undertook a highly idiosyncratic project - the publication of a fashion magazine (La Derniere Mode) that he almost single-handedly wrote and edited. Using a variety of feminine and masculine pseudonyms to theorize about the concept of fashion and to report and advise on womens clothing, popular vacation destinations, home furnishings and entertainment, Mallarme created a spectacularly original work that lies somewhere between Baudelaires seminal treatment of fashion in his essay on modernity, The Painter of Modern Life, and The Fashion System, Barthes brilliant semiology of clothing in the latter twentieth century. But the distinguishing feature of Mallarms magazine, and what differentiates it from the writing of Baudelaire and Barthes, is that it explores the nature of fashion from the inside. It is a genuine fashion magazine aspiring to lead fashion, though at the same time, by ingenious and appealing ironies, subtly satirizing this whole genre of writing. Various theories have been entertained about the work in the past, such as its being a prose poem, or alternatively a hoax or a mere money-making venture, but the present translators, in their commentary, argue that such guesses are hopelessly off the mark. Complete with the original artwork and a contextualizing introduction and commentary, Furbank and Cains definitive translation of one of French literatures greatest puzzles and surprises represents a major contribution to students, critics, theoreticians, and intellectual historians alike.

In the later months of 1874, the great French poet, Stephane Mallarme, undertook a highly idiosyncratic project - the publication of a fashion magazine (La Derniere Mode) that he almost single-handedly wrote and edited. Using a variety of feminine and masculine pseudonyms to theorize about the concept of fashion and to report and advise on womens clothing, popular vacation destinations, home furnishings and entertainment, Mallarme created a spectacularly original work that lies somewhere between Baudelaires seminal treatment of fashion in his essay on modernity, The Painter of Modern Life, and The Fashion System, Barthes brilliant semiology of clothing in the latter twentieth century. But the distinguishing feature of Mallarms magazine, and what differentiates it from the writing of Baudelaire and Barthes, is that it explores the nature of fashion from the inside. It is a genuine fashion magazine aspiring to lead fashion, though at the same time, by ingenious and appealing ironies, subtly satirizing this whole genre of writing. Various theories have been entertained about the work in the past, such as its being a prose poem, or alternatively a hoax or a mere money-making venture, but the present translators, in their commentary, argue that such guesses are hopelessly off the mark. Complete with the original artwork and a contextualizing introduction and commentary, Furbank and Cains definitive translation of one of French literatures greatest puzzles and surprises represents a major contribution to students, critics, theoreticians, and intellectual historians alike.

The publication of the 44-volume Works of Daniel Defoe continues with this collection of Defoe's satirical poetry and fantasy writings, and writings on the supernatural.

The publication of the 44-volume Works of Daniel Defoe continues with this collection of Defoe's satirical poetry and fantasy writings, and writings on the supernatural.

The publication of the 44-volume Works of Daniel Defoe continues with this collection of Defoe's satirical poetry and fantasy writings, and writings on the supernatural.

The publication of the 44-volume Works of Daniel Defoe continues with this collection of Defoe's satirical poetry and fantasy writings, and writings on the supernatural.

This volume reveals the extraordinary range of Daniel Defoe's intellectual interests. Three volumes are devoted to major historical writings by Defoe. His "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" and "History of the Union of Great Britain" are included here.

This volume reveals the extraordinary range of Daniel Defoe's intellectual interests. Three volumes are devoted to major historical writings by Defoe. His "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" and "History of the Union of Great Britain" are included here.

This volume reveals the extraordinary range of Daniel Defoe's intellectual interests. Three volumes are devoted to major historical writings by Defoe. His "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" and "History of the Union of Great Britain" are included here.

This volume reveals the extraordinary range of Daniel Defoe's intellectual interests. Three volumes are devoted to major historical writings by Defoe. His "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" and "History of the Union of Great Britain" are included here.

The life story of Marie-Madeleine Jodin opens an exciting new perspective on the world of 18th-century women, European court theatres, and, most strikingly, entails the remarkable discovery of a previously unknown French feminist. In 1790, Jodin, a protégée of Denis Diderot and a former actress, published a treatise entitled Vues législatives pour les femmes (Legislative Views for Women), which can lay claim to being the first signed, female-authored feminist manifesto of the French Revolutionary period, and which reveals Jodin's wide reading in women's history and feminist writing since ancient times. This new critical and contextual biography traces the turbulent life of an extraordinary woman, focusing particularly on her transformation from artisan's daughter, to tragic actress, to Enlightenment intellectual and feminist. The authors analyze the confrontations and scandals that beset her career, and read her feminist treatise-here reproduced, for the first time in English, in its entirety-as the summation of a chaotic but passionate existence. Also presented for the first time in English, fully set in their biographical and historical context, are the twenty-one letters that constitute Diderot's correspondence with Jodin. The varied and fascinating documentation concerning Jodin, which has only recently been discovered, provides a window on the world of 18th-century women. While memoirs and biographies of aristocratic women and upwardly mobile salonières such as Mme. Geoffrin and Mme. Roland are legion, chronicles of the lives of individual women lower down the social ladder are far fewer in number. A contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges, Jodin argued for the social reform of working-class women, particularly prostitutes, to render them worthy to exercise the rights of citizenship.