Irony and Bildung in Feminist Educational Writings (Wollstonecraft, Macaulay, Edgeworth)

The context of the present paper is my research on philosophies of female education and the questions of female Bildung in the 18th and 19th centuries in England. I have been studying works on educationalist and philosophical concerns and literary works, such as the Bildungsromane and utopian novels written in the period. Female writings – either literary-utopian or educational- philosophical – seem to rely on the framework and theoretical background of well-known male works in order to present a critical and ironical reading while also raising questions of social solidarity and (e)quality in individual Bildung. In my paper, I highlight the strategies of feminist rhetoric, taking my textual examples from Mary Wollstonecraft’s anti-Rousseauian A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), while I also refer to educational writings by two of her contemporaries, Catharine Macaulay and Maria Edgeworth