Styles of Enlightenment
Subtitle: taste, politics and authorship in eighteenth-century France
By: Elena Russo.
Series: Parallax; Parallax (Baltimore, Md.)
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 346
ISBN-13: 9780801884764
Subjects: French literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Enlightenment -- France; France -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
Description: "Styles of Enlightenment argues that alongside its democratic ideals and its efforts to create a unified public sphere, the Enlightenment also displayed a tendency to erect rigid barriers when it came to matters of style and artistic expression." "Through readings of fictions, essays, memoirs, eulogies, and theatrical works by Fenelon, Bouhours, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Mercier, Thomas, and others, Styles of Enlightenment traces the stages of confrontation between the virile philosophe 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. It teases out the finer points of division on the public battlefields of literature and politics and the new world of contesting sexual economies."--Jacket.
Notes: "Gift of Edward Ousselin"--Bookplate.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: Boudoir and tribune; title: A faded coquette: Marivaux and the Philosophes; title: Fakes, impostors, and Beaux esprits: conversation's backstage; title: The sly and the coy mistress: style and manner from Fénelon to Diderot; title: Capturing fireside conversation: Diderot and Marivaux's stylistic challenge; title: Grace and the epistemology of confused perception; title: Between Paris and Rome: Montesquieu's poetry of history; title: Montesquieu for the masses, or implanting false memory; title: Everlasting theatricality: Arlequin and the untamed parterre; title: Epilogue: The costume of modernity.