Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment : taste, politics and authorship in eighteenth-century France
Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006
ISBN 0801884764
"Styles of Enlightenment" shows how French Enlightenment thought emerged from the clash between two competing social and aesthetic world-views: marketplace modernity and the archaic, republican sublime. Through readings of fiction, essays, memoirs, eulogies, and theatrical works by Fenelon, Bouhours, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Mercier, Thomas, and others, Elena Russo traces the stages of confrontation between the virile philosopher and the effeminate worldly writer; "good" and "bad" taste; high art and frivolous entertainment; state patronage and the privately sponsored marketplace; the academic eulogy and worldly conversation. She teases out the finer points of division on the public battlefields of literature and politics, as well as the new world of contesting sexual economies which increasingly extended from the private to the public sphere.
[ Mis en ligne le 9 février 2007 par Sarah Benharrech ]
