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Lynn Hunt
The Family Romance of the French Revolution
$21.95, paperback
978-0-520-08270-0
Available Now
213 pages,
June 1992, Not available in British Commonwealth; Include Canada;
Categories: History; European History; French Studies; Gender Studies
June 1992, Not available in British Commonwealth; Include Canada;
Categories: History; European History; French Studies; Gender Studies
Free online edition (eScholarship)--available only to University of California faculty, staff, and students (List of public titles)
"Entertaining, original and provocative. . . . [Hunt] is interested in what historians have always thought were the central political issues of the period—power, authority, legitimacy—but she approaches them by ingenious indirection. She is also a scrupulous scholar."—Tony Judt, New York Times Book Review
"[A] lively, lusty psychoanalytic history. . . . Hunt is critical of Freud, but in pornographic engravings, essays and other arts of the period she finds credence for his prediction, in Totem and Taboo, that 'In the absence of the father, the normal laws of legitimacy and social order do not prevail.'"—Los Angeles Times Book Review
"This study will definitely challenge many a complacent historian."—John Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle
"[A] lively, lusty psychoanalytic history. . . . Hunt is critical of Freud, but in pornographic engravings, essays and other arts of the period she finds credence for his prediction, in Totem and Taboo, that 'In the absence of the father, the normal laws of legitimacy and social order do not prevail.'"—Los Angeles Times Book Review
"This study will definitely challenge many a complacent historian."—John Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle
This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a multidisciplinary investigation of the foundations of modern politics. "Family Romance" was coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and joining one of higher social standing. Lynn Hunt uses the term broadly to describe the images of the familial order underlying revolutionary politics. In a wide-ranging account using novels, engravings, paintings, speeches, newspaper editorials, pornographic writing, and revolutionary legislation about the family, Hunt shows that politics were experienced through the grid of the family romance.