Border crossing with Rousseau: Emile and Francisco de Miranda's Tour of the United States, 1783–1784
Abstract Drawing on Charles W.J. Withers's analysis of the transnational geographies of Enlightenment culture, this essay reconsiders the early Atlantic border crossings of Francisco de Miranda, forerunner of Latin American independence, in relation to Emile, Jean Jacques Rousseau's revolutionary work on education. During his time as an officer in Cádiz, Spain, Miranda participated in the circulation and reading of Rousseau, extending a network of readers who challenged the Inquisition's criminalization of forbidden books in what might be called a shadow public sphere. Miranda's travel diary of his journey through the United States, Diario del Viaje por los Estados Unidos de América del Norte (The Diary of Francisco de Miranda: Tour of the United States, 1783–1784) shows how he transculturated Rousseau's theories on empiricism, travel and education, and political maturation to develop a secular creole epistemology that ushered and affirmed his vision of independence, and his entry into the larger Enlightenment republic of letters as a self-identified American. Miranda thus enacted a model of traveling knowledge-making that paralleled and diverged from the work of Jesuits such as Francisco Clavijero and others who, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra shows, developed patriotic epistemologies within religious frameworks.
A Latin American Casanova? Sex, Gender, Enlightenment and Revolution in the Life and Writings of Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816)
This paper looks from a gender perspective at the elusive figure, complex personality and myth of Francisco de Miranda, enlightened traveller and Precursor of Latin American independence. By analysing Miranda's personal archive as his own carefully crafted creation, it pursues three closely connected issues insufficiently interpreted in historical perspective: the forms of masculinity he embodied and those from which he distanced himself, his connections with women and the role that gender played in his assessments of the countries he visited and wrote about. Miranda's trajectory and self‐image trace an evolution (from mondain seducer and enlightened reader and thinker, to revolutionary sympathiser with women's intelligence and even women's rights, to his embracing more traditional domestic arrangements), not exempt from contradictions that shed new light on the complex dynamics of gender in the Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions. The ambivalences of his life and writings tell us much about the different and at times conflicting ways of being a man and relating to women in both the Hispanic world and the broader European and American context of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
The development of the English novel
Citation: Dille, Grace. The development of the English novel. Senior thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1897.