This study looks at the lives of the most famous "wild children" of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angelique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized.

A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After...

Rousseau and Dignity: Art Serving Humanity is a richly illustrated volume relating a series of events-a photography exhibit, lectures, commentary, and audience reactions by people ages seven to ninety-two-held in the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's tercentennial in 2012. Drawn together by the unexpected convergence of a lecture series and art exhibit held in South Bend, Indiana, and a documentary film that was shot simultaneously in Compiegne, France, the participants had several goals: to show why Rousseau's moral philosophy is important for our time; to argue for the importance of...

Exotic Women Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancient Regime France Julia V. Douthwaite Julia V. Douthwaite describes the interrelated representations of cultural and sexual difference in key French works of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The heroines of this book are foreign women, brought to France through no will of their own, and forced into the margins of a new society. The author contends that their experience resonates with larger cultural beliefs about exotic and primitive peoples in ancien regime France and illuminates some of the blind spots in...