When Jean-Jacque Rousseau sat down to write his influential and controversial
“Confessions,”
he unintentionally started two revolutions. On the one hand, the
idea of an autobiography was
something new to the literary world, so “[f]or the
first time, an author’s intimate emotional life
became the subject of his work”
(Puchner 385). At the same time, Rouseau’s book also offered a new
kind of hero
to his audience, a hero who was an “isolated but extraordinary individual,
unhappy in his
solitude but brave in...
