Madame Germaine de Stael is often regarded as the "mistress to
an age," or (like England and Russia) one of the three great
European "powers" of the nineteenth century. She was in some sense
both, but she was also an important and influential writer whose
works, astonishingly, have not, until this volume, been translated
into English since the early nineteenth century. She absorbed the
leading ideas of the Enlightenment on literature, politics,
science, and the social order; turned many of them to her own uses
and then bequeathed them to the nineteenth century, which adopted
much of the Enlightenment through her works.
She had two related aims: by her writings on politics, to guide
Europe as it entered the republican era and to help it maintain its
cultural legacy and liberty; and to explain all literature by its
relation to social institutions (which has had a profound effect on
all subsequent studies of comparative literature).
Here, in clear and flowing English prose that conveys both the
personality and the style of the original-and that corrects the
errors of earlier translations-are selections from Madame Germaine
de Stael's major works, including Considerations on the Principal
Events of the French Revolution, Literature Considered in Its
Relation to Social Institutions, Essay on Fiction, On Germany, and
her reflections on Russian and English as well as German national
character. They make plain both her amazingly modern approach to
such subjects as politics, literature, science, education, and
women, and the tremendous repercussions her work has had.
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