Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France - Hardcover

Landes, Joan B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080143811X ISBN 13: 9780801438110

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual political arguments.

Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and public arenas. Landes tells the fascinating story of how the depiction of the nation as a desirable female body worked to eroticize patriotism and to bind male subjects to the nation-state. Despite their political subordination, women too were invited to identify with the project of nationalism.

Recent views of the French Revolution have emphasized linguistic concerns; in contrast, Landes stresses the role of visual cognition in fashioning ideas of nationalism and citizenship. Her book demonstrates as well that the image is often a site of contestation, as individual viewers may respond to it in unexpected, even subversive, ways.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"Clear, cogent, and convincing, Visualizing the Nation provides a compelling alternative to recent studies of this period that see the new French nation as bound together primarily through ties of man to man. Joan B. Landes reminds us that heterosexual desire was still a potent force and could be aroused by images of female vulnerability, beauty, and motherhood. Offering a first-rate synthesis in lucid, highly readable prose, this original book will satisfy the specialist while remaining accessible to a wider audience."--Mary D. Sheriff, University of North Carolina

"While this book will certainly prove to be a genuine contribution to French Revolution scholarship, readers in other fields will find its examination of 'ways of seeing' to be highly useful and suggestive. A most intelligent and innovative book, Visualizing the Nation gathers and brings to fruition the growing literature on the body in Revolutionary politics."--Patrice Higonnet, Harvard University

About the Author

Joan B. Landes is Professor of Women's Studies and History at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, also from Cornell, and Feminism, the Public and the Private.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 080143811X
• ISBN 13: 9780801438110
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272