Studies in Eighteenth-century French Literature

Studies in Eighteenth-century French Literature PDF Author: Robert Niklaus
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
These Studies in Eighteenth-Century French Literature presented to Robert Niklaus were written by former students and colleagues and by his friends, to mark his retirement in 1975. The articles all relate to the French Enlightenment, Professor Niklaus's main academic interest, but vay in approach and subject. Six articles deal with aspects of the works of Diderot: his philosophy, aesthetics, narrative art and style. There are articles on Voltaire - his social, political and philosophical attitudes - and on Montesquieu, among others. The book as a whole is evidence of the continuing vitality of the Enlightenment and makes a fitting complement to Professor Niklaus's own important and lively contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

Studies in Eighteenth-century French Literature

Studies in Eighteenth-century French Literature PDF Author: Robert Niklaus
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
These Studies in Eighteenth-Century French Literature presented to Robert Niklaus were written by former students and colleagues and by his friends, to mark his retirement in 1975. The articles all relate to the French Enlightenment, Professor Niklaus's main academic interest, but vay in approach and subject. Six articles deal with aspects of the works of Diderot: his philosophy, aesthetics, narrative art and style. There are articles on Voltaire - his social, political and philosophical attitudes - and on Montesquieu, among others. The book as a whole is evidence of the continuing vitality of the Enlightenment and makes a fitting complement to Professor Niklaus's own important and lively contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

Studies in eighteenth-century French literature

Studies in eighteenth-century French literature PDF Author: John Howard Fox
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France

Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Christine Adams
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271026091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This volume brings together eight essays (all but one previously unpublished) that offer innovative strategies for studying society and culture in eighteenth-century France. Divided into three sections, the chapters map out current research paths in social, cultural, and political history. The authors engage the most heated subjects of debate in the field today, including the changing nature of political life in the age of Enlightenment, the role of public opinion in undermining absolutism, and the impact of gender on social relationships and political language in the late eighteenth century. They demonstrate a marked interest in the lives of ordinary and humble French people, finding that exclusion from the main corridors of power fostered cunning and resourcefulness, not political indifference or ignorance. The articles encompass the Old Regime and the revolutionary era without falling into the teleological trap of using the former as the backdrop for the events of 1789. On the contrary, many of the authors consciously avoid this bias by investigating the Old Regime in its own right or by consciously linking the pre- and postrevolutionary eras. This decision alone marks an important turning of the tide. By establishing a dialogue between the Old Regime and the revolution, this volume implicitly pays homage to those historians who insist on the structural continuities that underlay the rupture of 1789. Contributors are Cissie Fairchilds, Christine Adams, Orest Ranum, Lisa Jane Graham, Harvey Chisick, John Garrigus, Lenard Berlanstein, and Jack Censer.

Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France

Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Fayçal Falaky
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684483425
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.

Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment

Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment PDF Author: Reginald McGinnis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135024626
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Book Description
Are legal concepts of intellectual property and copyright related to artistic notions of invention and originality? Do literary and legal scholars have anything to learn from each other, or should the legal debate be viewed as separate from questions of aesthetics? Bridging what are usually perceived as two distinct areas of inquiry, this interdisciplinary volume begins with a reflection on the "origins" of literary and legal questions in the Enlightenment to consider their ramifications in the post-Enlightenment and contemporary world. Tying in to the growing scholarly interest in connections between law and literature, on the one hand, and to the contemporary interrogation of "originality" and "authorship," on the other hand, the present volume furthers research in the field by providing a dense study of the legal and historical context to re-examine our current assumptions about supposed earlier Enlightenment and Romantic ideals of individual authorship and originality.

Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France

Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Robert M. Schwartz
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469639882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Robert Schwartz examines the French government's attempts to suppress mendicity from the reign of Louis XIV to the Revolution. His study provides a rich account of the evolution of poverty, the varied and shifting attitudes toward the delinquent poor, and the government's efforts to control mendicity by strengthening the state's repressive machinery during the eighteenth century. As Schwartz demonstrates, popular conceptions of the mendicant poor in the ancient regime increasingly focused on the threat that they presented to the rest of society, thereby opening the way for the central state to augment its authority and enhance its credibility by acting as the agent protecting the majority of the populace from its threat to public security. Government efforts to control the activity of the "unworthy poor" -- those of sound mind and body who were seen to prefer idleness over productive work -- were most pronounced during two periods of repressive policing, one in the early eighteenth century and the other in the last two decades before the Revolution. From 1724 to 1733 beggars were interned in hopitaux, existing municipal institutions intended for the care of the "worthy poor," including orphans, the infirm, and the aged. But from 1768 until the outbreak of the Revolution, more stringent measures were taken. Sturdy beggars and vagrants were confined apart from the worthy poor on specially established, royal workhouses called depots de mendicite, and in the case of some repeat offenders, were sentenced to the galleys. This stepped-up level of policing arose not only from royal administrators' long-standing view of mendicity as criminal activity; it was also made possible because the propertied classes had likewise come to believe the mendicant poor were a danger rather than a nuisance. Economic and demographic conditions combined to swell the ranks of paupers and vagrants, especially in the 1760s and 1770s, and social tensions, along with calls for government action, multiplied in proportion to their numbers. As villagers came to call upon the improved royal police for help, a popular mental association of the state with public security began to take root. In arriving at these conclusions, Schwartz concentrates on law enforcement in a single area, Lower Normandy, but continually provides a perspective on local events by putting them in the context of national trends and realities. He tells the story of the poor in eighteenth-century France in sympathetic terms, giving a human face to poverty and to the men who policed its effects. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers

Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers PDF Author: Faith E. Beasley
Publisher: Modern Language Association of America
ISBN: 9781603290951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France has been celebrated as the period of conversation. Salons flourished and became an important social force. Women and men worked together, in dialogue with their contemporaries, other texts, and their culture to create novels, political satire, drama, poetry, fairy tales, travel narratives, and philosophy. Yet the inclusion of women's contributions, only recently recovered, changes the way we conceive of the period that constitutes one of the building blocks of French national identity and Western civilization, and teachers are often unsure how and where to incorporate the texts into their courses. Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers attempts to reconstruct these conversations by integrating women's work into classrooms across the curriculum. The works of French women writers are crucial to courses on the early modern period and enliven many others—whether on literature, history, women's history, the history of science, philosophy, women's and gender studies, or European civilization. The essays included in part 1 provide necessary background and help instructors identify places in their courses that could be enriched by taking women's participation into account. Contributors in part 2 focus on some of the central writers and genres of the period, including Lafayette, Charrière, and Graffigny, the epistolary novel, convent writing, and memoirs. The essays in part 3 offer concrete descriptions of courses that place women's texts in dialogue with those of their male colleagues or with historical issues.

Shapely Bodies

Shapely Bodies PDF Author: Christine A. Jones
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644530740
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, stylish patterns, and accessories. These practices crossed paths in the work of artisans, whose luxury objects reflected and also influenced the curves of fashion in the eighteenth century. French artisans began trials to reproduce fine Chinese porcelain in the 1660s. The challenge proved impossible until they found an essential ingredient, kaolin, in French soil in the 1760s. Shapely Bodies differs from other studies of French porcelain in that it does not begin in the 1760s at the Sèvres manufactory when it became technically possible to produce fine porcelain in France, but instead ends there. Without the secret of Chinese porcelain, artisans in France turned to radical forms of experimentation. Over the first half of the eighteenth century, they invented artificial alternatives to Chinese porcelain, decorated them with French style, and, with equal determination, shaped an identity for their new trade that distanced it from traditional guild-crafts and aligned it with scientific invention. The back story of porcelain making before kaolin provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of artisanal innovation and cultural mythmaking. To write artificial porcelain into a history of “real” porcelain dominated by China, Japan, and Meissen in Saxony, French porcelainiers learned to describe their new commodity in language that tapped into national pride and the mythic power of French savoir faire. Artificial porcelain cut such a fashionable image that by the mid-eighteenth century, Louis XV appropriated it for the glory of the crown. When the monarchy ended, revolutionaries reclaimed French porcelain, the fruit of a century of artisanal labor, for the Republic. Tracking how the porcelain arts were depicted in documents and visual arts during one hundred years of experimentation, Shapely Bodies reveals the politics behind the making of French porcelain’s image. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

History of French Literature in the Eighteenth Century

History of French Literature in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description


The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction

The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction PDF Author: Olivier Delers
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611495822
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The rise of the novel paradigm—and the underlying homology between the rise of a bourgeois middle class and the coming of age of a new literary genre—continues to influence the way we analyze economic discourse in the eighteenth-century French novel. Characters are often seen as portraying bourgeois values, even when historiographical evidence points to the virtual absence of a self-conscious and coherent bourgeoisie in France in the early modern period. Likewise, the fact that the nobility was a dynamic and diverse group whose members had learned to think in individualistic and meritocratic terms as a result of courtly politics is often ignored. The Other Rise of the Novel calls for a radical revision of how realism, the language of self-interest and commercial exchanges, and idealized noble values interact in the early modern novel. It focuses on two novels from the seventeenth century, Furetière’s Roman bourgeois and Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves and four novels from the eighteenth century, Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Sade’s Les infortunes de la vertu. It argues that eighteenth-century French fiction does not reflect material culture mimetically and that character action is best analyzed by focusing on the social and discursive exchanges staged by the text, rather than by trying to create parallels between specific behavior and actual historical changes. The novel produces its own reality by transforming characters and their stories into alternative social models, different articulations of how individuals should define their economic relations to others. The representation of interpersonal relations often highlights personal conceptions of private interest that cannot be easily reconciled with the traditional narrative of a transition towards economic modernity. Realism, then, is not only about verisimilar storytelling and psychological depth: it is an epistemological questioning about the type of access to reality that a particular genre can give its readers.