SOURCE: “Speech in Action: Language, Society, and Subject in Germaine de Staël's Corinne,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 4, July, 1995, pp. 393-408.

In the following essay, Birkett discusses the dynamics of subjective and collective narrative voice within the feminist text of Corinne.

A central preoccupation in Germaine de Staël's Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807),¹ and one which is returning to contemporary agendas with a political urgency equal to that of its feminist theme, is the problematic of the relation between the individual subject and the social and political community. In his influential collection of lectures, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985),² Jürgen Habermas has renewed the debate with two fresh contributions: his concept of the “communication community,” and his meditations on modernity's consciousness of time. In this essay, I use Habermas's insights to illuminate the modernity of Corinne, and in particular to explore the mechanics and the meaning...