Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Genevan contrarian who recast politics, education, and the self. His Confessions announce that a life can be literature because it is uniquely felt.

Invented modern literary autobiography and a politics of sincerity that Romanticism would inherit.

Primary works

Autobiography · 1782

Confessions

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau proposes to show a man in all the truth of nature: childhood thefts, erotic shame, political quarrels. Sincerity becomes a new literary heroism.

Confession