Romanticism and Civilization: Love, Marriage, and Family in Rousseaus Julie

(Hardback)

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Romanticism and Civilization examines romantic alternatives to modern life in Rousseaus foundational novel Julie. It argues that Julie is a response to the ills of modern civilization, and that Rousseau saw that the Enlightenments combination of science and of democracy degraded human life by making it bourgeois. The bourgeois is man uprooted by science and attached to nothing but himself. He lives a commercial life and his materialism and calculations penetrate all aspects of his existence. He is neither citizen, nor family man, nor lover in any serious sense: his life is meaningless. Rousseaus romanticism in Julie is an attempt to find connectedness through the sentiments of private life and wholeness through love, marriage, and family.

Reviews

In Romanticism and Civilization, [there] is a reader and imitator of Richardson and Prvost, a would-be stoic and Platonist, a novelist wise enough to separate his novel from politics, and a writer who manages to synchronize the conservative values of Christian piety, aristocratic honor, and patriarchal authority in Julie. * European Romantic Review *

Author Bio

Mark Kremer is associate professor of political science at Kennesaw State University.