For all the fame he won as a writer during a brief but astonishingly fertile period in the 1750s and early 1760s, Rousseau thought the making of books essentially foreign to his nature; what mattered most to him was making things. Descended as he was from a long line of watchmakers, and raised in the artisanal heart of Geneva, he helped the promotion of craft associated with his one-time friend Diderot, whose Encyclopedie proclaimed the varied virtues of manual activity. Taking as its point of departure the moral and monetary economy of craftsmanship in eighteenth-century Switzerland, this elegant and original study shows how family tradition and his own unfinished apprenticeship to an engraver led Rousseau to a radical questioning of central issues of the day, particularly in light of the moral utilitarianism of his age. Rousseau's Hand highlights the vital place of handwork in the artistic and social writings of his middle years - from novels and plays to treatises and other forms of discourse - illuminating many matters traditionally seen as inconsistencies in his oeuvre as a whole. Abandoning creative writing for music copying in middle life, Rousseau celebrated homo faber's integrity along with the practicality and usefulness of handwork in the face of depersonalizing technological advance; yet the writings in which he extolled these virtues won him persecution as well as European celebrity. The paradox of craft's material essence in what he thought a world of abhorrent materialism and the problematic mechanization of ordinary existence exercised him throughout his life. Rousseau's Hand explores these preoccuptions.

How does exile beget writing, and writing exile? What kind of writing can both be fuelled by absence and prolong it? Exile, which was meant to imprison her, paradoxically gave Madame de Stael a freedom that enabled her to be as active a dissident as any woman in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was capable of being. Repeatedly banished for her nonconformism, she felt she had been made to suffer twice over, first for political daring and then for daring, as a woman, to be political (a particularly grave offence in the eyes of the misogynist Napoleon). Yet her outspokenness - in novels, comparative literary studies, and works of political and social theory - made her seem as much a threat outside her beloved France as within it, while her friendship with statesmen, soldiers, and literary figures such as Byron, Fanny Burney, Goethe, and Schiller simply added to her dangerous celebrity. She preached the virtues of liberalism and freedom wherever she went, turning the experiences of her enforced absence into an arsenal to use against all who tried to suppress her. Even Napoleon, perhaps her greatest foe, conceded, from his own exile on St Helena that she would last. Her unremitting activity as a speaker and writer made her into precisely the sort of activist no woman at that time was permitted to be; yet she paradoxically remained a reluctant feminist, seeming even to connive at the inferior status society granted her sex at the same time as vociferously challenging it, and remaining torn by the conflicting demands of public and private life.

Theories of memory and fictional recreations of the remembering mind have occupied a central place in French literature since Montaigne. The author investigates the shifting relation between cognitive or "scientific" memory and emotional or spiritual recollection in a series of major writers from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Her study focuses on the 18th century, where the interplay between memory and imagination and the link between self-knowledge and self-presentation are shown to be exceptionally fertile. The philosophical, scientific and fictional writings of Diderot and the novels and autobiographical works of Rousseau are central to this ground-breaking work, which should be of interest to all readers concerned with the specificity of the French literary tradition.