A Woman's Laws and a Man's: Eros and Thumos in Rousseau's Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) and The Deer Hunter (1978)

ABSTRACT:

Rousseau's New Heloise, the most popular novel of the eighteenth century, transformed the author from a celebrated philosopher into the object of a cult. It also transformed the history of literature through its influence on giants like Goethe, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. Today, however, the New Heloise is seldom read and even less often enjoyed. This paper aims to recover Rousseau’s novel for our time.