Research Catalog
Intelligent souls? : feminist orientalism in eighteenth-century English literature
- Title
- Intelligent souls? : feminist orientalism in eighteenth-century English literature / Samara Anne Cahill.
- Author
- Cahill, Samara Anne
- Publication
- Lewisburg, PA : Bucknell University Press, [2019]
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person. | Text | Use in library | JFE 19-8474 | Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315 |
Details
- Description
- 232 pages; 25 cm.
- Summary
- "Do women have souls? Christianity has traditionally held the soul to be the seat of reason, intelligence, humanity, immortality, and moral agency. But the Book of Genesis never says that God breathed a soul into Eve. Women's souls thus became significant in Reformation satires as Protestants and Catholics debated whether scripture alone or institutional authority ought to determine interpretation. In England, these satires eventually intersected with what scholars have called the "Trinitarian Controversy," a dispute about the nature of Christ that paralleled the interpretive difficulty regarding the nature of women's souls. In order to marginalize heterodox thinkers who claimed that Christ was not of the same substance as God the Father, orthodox Anglicans collapsed the distinction between schism and heresy by comparing heterodox Christians to a sexualized stereotype of Muslim despots. Part of this stereotype was the (erroneous) claim that Muslim doctrine asserted that women did not have souls and could only experience physical, not intellectual, pleasure. Thus, the problem of competing Christian biblical interpretations could be foisted onto a stereotype of Muslim men as brutal, self-serving misogynists. Englishwomen soon took up the trope to argue that a truly enlightened, and necessarily Christian, Englishman would support improvements in women's education--and feminist orientalism was born"--
- Series Statement
- Transits: literature, thought & culture, 1650-1850
- Uniform Title
- Transits (Bucknell University)
- Subjects
- Genre/Form
- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Contents
- Introduction: foreign intelligence -- The negative ideal -- Minding the gap -- The canal of pleasure -- A "foreign and uninteresting" subject -- The "Mahometan strain" -- Epilogue: save our souls?
- Call Number
- JFE 19-8474
- ISBN
- 9781684480982
- 1684480981
- 9781684480975
- 1684480973
- 9781684481002
- 1684481007
- LCCN
- 2018058747
- 40029230184
- OCLC
- 1057376496
- Author
- Cahill, Samara Anne, author.
- Title
- Intelligent souls? : feminist orientalism in eighteenth-century English literature / Samara Anne Cahill.
- Publisher
- Lewisburg, PA : Bucknell University Press, [2019]
- Type of Content
- text
- Type of Medium
- unmediated
- Type of Carrier
- volume
- Series
- Transits: literature, thought & culture, 1650-1850Transits (Bucknell University)
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Chronological Term
- 1700-1799
- Other Standard Identifier
- 40029230184
- Research Call Number
- JFE 19-8474