Long a consecrated figure in the history of Romanticism, Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) and her career have acquired a new prominence in the last two decades due to the great interest in women's writing. Essayist, critic, historian, political theorist, playwright, novelist, author of travel literature, and of a broad correspondence, Staël composed texts before, during and after the French Revolution. Her work spans the transition from literary neoclassicism to Romanticism and displays the tensions and ambivalences of this upheaval in aesthetics as much as in politics.
Vibrantly alive and energetic in her life, Germaine de Staël was the daughter of Louis XVI's celebrated finance minister, Jacques Necker. In her youth, as wife of the Swedish ambassador to the King's court, she became a great salonnière as the Revolution began. A public intellectual, she involved herself in all of the transformational issues of the Revolution. She was to live much of her life in exile from her native Paris, mainly in Coppet in Switzerland, her father's estate, which she transformed into a hospitable haven for Europe's intellectuals. Later, as a chief opponent of Napoleon, she was forced into a fugitive existence, fleeing across Europe from Germany to Poland, Russia, Sweden, and England. Forced to traverse geographical frontiers, she learned to transcend intellectual and spiritual borders. Her works portray protagonists who seek redefinition in flight from confinement. Her language struggles to surpass the limitations imposed by convention and her texts resist the frameworks of genre.
Staël's refusal of prior categories is visible in her embrace of constitutionalism, in her pioneering role in the development of liberalism, in her expansive cosmopolitanism, in her openness to an aesthetic of enthusiasm, in her hunger for spirituality, and in her vexed questioning of gender hegemony. These are some of the problematics posed by Staël's texts that form the substance of our symposium featuring distinguished scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Sweden, Canada, Japan, and USA.