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"Books and reading -- France -- History -- 18th century"
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A literary tour de France : the world of books on the eve of the French Revolution
\"The publishing industry in France in the years before the Revolution was a lively and sometimes rough-and-tumble affair, as publishers and printers scrambled to deal with (and if possible evade) shifting censorship laws and tax regulations, in order to cater to a reading public's appetite for books of all kinds, from the famous Encyclopâedie, repository of reason and knowledge, to scandal-mongering libel and pornography. Historian and librarian Robert Darnton uses his exclusive access to a trove of documents-letters and documents from authors, publishers, printers, paper millers, type founders, ink manufacturers, smugglers, wagon drivers, warehousemen, and accountants-involving a publishing house in the Swiss town of Neuchatel to bring this world to life. Like other places on the periphery of France, Switzerland was a hotbed of piracy, carefully monitoring the demand for certain kinds of books and finding ways of fulfilling it. Focusing in particular on the diary of Jean-Franًcois Favarger, a traveling sales rep for a Swiss firm whose 1778 voyage, on horseback and on foot, around France to visit bookstores and renew accounts forms the spine of this story, Darnton reveals not only how the industry worked and which titles were in greatest demand, but the human scale of its operations. A Literary Tour de France is literally that. Darnton captures the hustle, picaresque comedy, and occasional risk of Favarger's travels in the service of books, and in the process offers an engaging, immersive, and unforgettable narrative of book culture at a critical moment in France's history\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution
Smoothly blending performance theory, literary analysis, and historical insights, Cecilia Feilla explores the mutually dependent discourses of feeling and politics and their impact on the theatre and theatre audiences during the French Revolution. Remarkably, the most frequently performed and popular plays from 1789 to 1799 were not the political action pieces that have been the subject of much literary and historical criticism, but rather sentimental dramas and comedies, many of which originated on the stages of the Old Regime. Feilla suggests that theatre provided an important bridge from affective communities of sentimentality to active political communities of the nation, arguing that the performance of virtue on stage served to foster the passage from private emotion to public virtue and allowed groups such as women, children, and the poor who were excluded from direct political participation to imagine a new and inclusive social and political structure. Providing close readings of texts by, among others, Denis Diderot, Collot d'Herbois, and Voltaire, Feilla maps the ways in which continuities and innovations in the theatre from 1760 to 1800 set the stage for the nineteenth century. Her book revitalizes and enriches our understanding of the significance of sentimental drama, showing that it was central to the way that drama both shaped and was shaped by political culture.
eBook
Through the Reading Glass
Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that surrounded women’s reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances, short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women. Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in women’s work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create new kinds of responsible and not merely responsive readers, and an integral part of the conviction that domestic reading does not have to be trivial.
eBook
The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution
Smoothly blending performance theory, literary analysis, and historical insights, Cecilia Feilla explores the mutually dependent discourses of feeling and politics and their impact on the theatre and theatre audiences during the French Revolution. Remarkably, the most frequently performed and popular plays from 1789 to 1799 were not the political action pieces that have been the subject of much literary and historical criticism, but rather sentimental dramas and comedies, many of which originated on the stages of the Old Regime. Feilla suggests that theatre provided an important bridge from affective communities of sentimentality to active political communities of the nation, arguing that the performance of virtue on stage served to foster the passage from private emotion to public virtue and allowed groups such as women, children, and the poor who were excluded from direct political participation to imagine a new and inclusive social and political structure. Providing close readings of texts by, among others, Denis Diderot, Collot d'Herbois, and Voltaire, Feilla maps the ways in which continuities and innovations in the theatre from 1760 to 1800 set the stage for the nineteenth century. Her book revitalizes and enriches our understanding of the significance of sentimental drama, showing that it was central to the way that drama both shaped and was shaped by political culture.
eBook
Early African American Print Culture
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem. In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars ranges over periods, locations, and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. The book's seventeen chapters consider domestic novels and gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers. Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation, and reading-and how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally. Published in cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia.
eBook
The other rise of the novel in eighteenth-century French fiction
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.
eBook
Two Kinds of \Literary Poison\: Diseases of the Learned and Overstimulating Novels in Georgian Britain
The twentyfirst century offers many parallels in medicalized concerns about the impact of media, notably the moral-neurological panic about the Internet \"rewiring our brains\" or becoming \"addicted\" to binge-watching Netflix.111 Since the mid-twentieth century, ideas of freedom of speech have expanded to include material (sometimes of great literary merit) previously regarded as obscene, which has taken much of the energy out of the debate, at least outside American evangelical circles.112 However, the central dynamic of the Georgian medical critique of reading persists as a medicalizing veneer on moral and political anxieties about media, especially in relation to young women.
Journal Article
Sauvages' Paperwork: How Disease Classification Arose from Scholarly Note-Taking
What was classification as it first took modern form in the eighteenth century, and how did it relate to earlier ways of describing and ordering? We offer new answers to these questions by examining medicine rather than botany and by reconstructing practice on paper. First among disease classifications was the 'nosology' of the Montpellier physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix. Analysis of his hitherto unstudied notebooks and of the nosology's many editions (1731-1772) shows that Boissier de Sauvages broke with earlier physicians' humanistic ordering of disease while sustaining the paper practices they had used. Scientific method was scholarly method. Classification arose through an incomplete break with, and intensified practice of, a past library-based way of ordering the described world. A new empiricism of generalizations (species) arose out of an older one of particulars (observationes). This happened through the rewriting - not the replacement - of the canon of disease knowledge since antiquity and its reordering on the printed page.
Journal Article
Through the Reading Glass
2005 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that
surrounded women's reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at
texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances,
short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new
female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading
culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly
and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women.
Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in
women's work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create
new kinds of responsible and not merely responsive readers, and an
integral part of the conviction that domestic reading does not have
to be trivial.
eBook