capacious

Firm Heart and Capacious Mind
$64.50
Firm Heart and Capacious Mind: The Life and Friends of Etienne Dumont is the first full-length biography of a Renaissance man, the statesman/publicist/jurist/political writer/man of letters who was hailed by Goethe, Macauley and Stendhal as one of the great intellects of his time. Among other activities he advised Mirabeau (he leader of the National Assembly) in the French Revolution, introduced Jeremy Bentham to the world by publishing ten volumes edited and rewritten from Bentham's notes, and led the political struggle that turned Geneva into a democracy. Dumont also played a direct role in such social reforms as the abolition of slavery, corresponding with and advising Samuel Romilly, William Wiberforce and others. A confirmed bachelor, he was admired and at times loved by some of the most prominent women of his time: Lady Holland, Madame de Stael and Maria Edgeworth. There has been no other full-length work, and no book at all in English, on this remarkable man.

Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century (Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize)
$39.50
Before 1660, English readers and theatergoers had never heard of a 'coquette'; by the early 1700s, they could hardly watch a play, read a poem, or peruse a newspaper without encountering one. Why does British literature of this period pay so much attention to vain and flirtatious young women? "Our Coquettes" examines the ubiquity of the coquette in the eighteenth century to show how this figure enables authors to comment upon a series of significant social and economic developments - including the growth of consumer culture, widespread new wealth, increased travel and global trade, and changes in the perception and practice of marriage. This book surveys stage comedies, periodical essays, satirical poems, popular songs, and didactic novels to show that the early coquette is a figure of capacious desire: she finds pleasure in a wide range of choices, refusing to narrow any field of possibilities (admirers, luxury goods, friends, pets, public gatherings) down to a single option. Whereas scholars of the period have generally read the coquette as a simple and self-evident type, "Our Coquettes" emphasizes what is strange and surprising about this figure, revealing the coquette to be a touchstone in developing discourses about sexuality, consumerism, empire, and modernity itself.