Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan

Considering her transformation of material from the works of European writers and orators such as Rousseau, Mirabeau, Felicité de Genlis, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Margareta de Cambon, as well as British sentimental philosophers and the radical theologian Richard Price, this book argues that Wollstonecraft espouses a cosmopolitan ethic that subordinates local and national allegiances to philanthropy, or love of humankind. At a time of international conflict, burgeoning capitalism and colonial enterprise, she represents philanthropy and cultural authenticity as the means to resist tyranny and imperialism in all their forms and light the way to global justice.

Laura Kirkley is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. She is a comparatist and specialist in literary translation with particular expertise in British and French women’s writing of the Revolutionary era. She has published widely on Wollstonecraft, whose translations she is currently editing for the Oxford University Press edition of The Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.