This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions is the first modern autobiography, and arguably the most influential autobiography ever written. What we think of as the "self," our self-sufficient identity, finds its roots in the Confessions. Rousseau's great autobiography speaks to us with a voice that is as relevant today as it was revolutionary and unsettling in the eighteenth...

This book is a lengthy work of literary criticism on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile; or, On Education. Rousseau considered Émile his best and most important work, however, because of the chapter entitled "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar," the book was banned in Paris and Geneva and publicly burned the year it was published. Émile proposes a system of education that maintains the value of the individual within a corrupt society. ...