Seducing The Eighteenth Century French Reader

Author : Paul J. Young
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351901362
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Seducing the Eighteenth-Century French Reader written by Paul J. Young and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As he demonstrates that narratives of seduction function as a master plot for French literature in the eighteenth century, Paul Young argues that the prevalence of this trope was a reaction to a dominant cultural discourse that coded the novel and the new practice of solitary reading as dangerous, seductive practices. Situating his study in the context of paintings, educational manuals, and criticism that caution against the act of reading, Young considers both canonical and lesser-known works by authors that include Rousseau, Sade, Bastide, Laclos, Crébillon fils, and the writers of two widely read libertine novels. How these authors responded to a cultural climate that viewed literature, and especially the novel, as seductive, sheds light on the perils and pleasures of authorship, the ways in which texts interact with the larger cultural discourse, and what eighteenth-century texts tell us about the dangers of reading or writing. Ultimately, Young argues, the seduction not in the text, but by the text raises questions about the nature of pleasure in eighteenth-century French literature and culture.

Author : Olivier Delers
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611495822
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction written by Olivier Delers and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Thomas Wynn
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198895321
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France written by Thomas Wynn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Wynn explores how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and, relatedly, the mode of closet drama: plays that were never performed within the playhouse. Drawing on queer theory, Wynn argues that eighteenth-century closet reading fostered disruptive pleasures that imparted another side to the period's 'théâtromanie'.

Author : Pierre Saint-Amand
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Libertine's Progress written by Pierre Saint-Amand and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Libertine's Progress is a comprehensive and concise study of the eighteenth-century French novel, providing a fresh look at amorous relations and offering a radical presentation of the dark side of the Enlightenment. In his preface to the new edition, Rene Girard writes of Pierre Saint-Amand's successful rendering of the essai classique, "Not a word in his book is superfluous; not a turn of phrase is selected for rhetorical effect. That is why he writes so elegantly." Maintaining that the eighteenth century was the last period to practice the art of seduction, Saint-Amand examines the complex relationship between desire and the ploys of those who seek to satisfy it. He writes about the magic that permeated the imagination of Enlightenment novelists and about the obscurity of amorous passion, placing modern seduction back in its archaic beginnings. This edition of the 1987 French publication has been substantially revised and extended in an elegant translation by Jennifer Curtiss Gage.

Author : GauvinAlexander Bailey
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351540378
Total Pages : 455 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Spiritual Rococo written by GauvinAlexander Bailey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking approach to Rococo religious d?r and spirituality in Europe and South America, The Spiritual Rococo addresses three basic conundrums that impede our understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetics and culture. Why did the Rococo, ostensibly the least spiritual style in the pre-Modern canon, transform into one of the world?s most important modes for adorning sacred spaces? And why is Rococo still treated as a decadent nemesis of the Enlightenment when the two had fundamental characteristics in common? This book seeks to answer these questions by treating Rococo as a global phenomenon for the first time and by exploring its moral and spiritual dimensions through the lens of populist French religious literature of the day-a body of work the author calls the ?Spiritual Rococo? and which has never been applied directly to the arts. The book traces Rococo?s development from France through Central Europe, Portugal, Brazil, and South America by following a chain of interlocking case studies, whether artistic, literary, or ideological, and it also considers the parallel diffusion of the literature of the Spiritual Rococo in these same regions, placing particular emphasis on unpublished primary sources such as inventories. One of the ultimate goals of this study is to move beyond the clich?f Rococo?s frivolity and acknowledge its essential modernity. Thoroughly interdisciplinary, The Spiritual Rococo not only integrates different art historical fields in novel ways but also interacts with church and social history, literary and post-colonial studies, and anthropology, opening up new horizons in these fields.

Author : Ms Julia Skelly
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 1409442373
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 written by Ms Julia Skelly and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the idea of excess has often been used to degrade, many of the essays in this collection demonstrate how it has also been used as a strategy for self-fashioning and empowerment, particularly by women and queer subjects. This volume examines a range of material - including ceramics, paintings, caricatures, interior design and theatrical performances - in various global contexts. Each case study sheds new light on how excess has been perceived and constructed, revealing how beliefs about excess have changed over time.

Author : Julia Skelly
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351539744
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book "The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600?010 " written by Julia Skelly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Directing unprecedented attention to how the idea of ?excess? has been used by both producers and consumers of visual and material culture, this collection examines the discursive construction of excess in relation to art, material goods and people in various global contexts. The contributors illuminate how excess has been perceived, quantified and constructed, revealing in the process how beliefs about excess have changed over time and how they have remained consistent. The collection as a whole underscores the fact that the concept of excess must always be considered critically, whether in scholarship or in lived experience. Although the idea of excess has often been used to shame and degrade, many of the essays in this collection demonstrate how it has also been used as a strategy for self-fashioning, transgression and empowerment, particularly by women and queer subjects. This volume examines a range of material, including diamonds, ceramics, paintings, dollhouses, caricatures, interior design and theatrical performances. Each case study sheds new light on how excess was used in a specific cultural context, including canonical sites of study such as the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, Victorian Britain and Paris in the 1920s, and under-studied contexts such as Canada and Sweden.

Author : Graeme Brooker
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1472539028
Total Pages : 726 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design written by Graeme Brooker and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design offers a compelling collection of original essays that seek to examine the shifting role of interior architecture and interior design, and their importance and meaning within the contemporary world. Interior architecture and interior design are disciplines that span a complexity of ideas, ranging from human behaviour and anthropology to history and the technology of the future. Approaches to designing the interior are in a constant state of flux, reflecting and adapting to the changing systems of history, culture and politics. It is this process that allows interior design to be used as evidence for identifying patterns of consumption, gender, identity and social issues. The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design provides a pioneering overview of the ideas and arrangements within the two disciplines that make them such important platforms from which to study the way humans interact with the space around them. Covering a wide range of thought and research, the book enables the reader to investigate fully the changing face of interior architecture and interior design, while offering questions about their future trajectory.

Author : Chris Roulston
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317090675
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France written by Chris Roulston and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth century, when the definition of marriage was shifting from one based on an hierarchical model to one based on notions of love and mutuality, marital life came under a more intense cultural scrutiny. This led to paradoxical forms of representation of marriage as simultaneously ideal and unlivable. Chris Roulston analyzes how, as representations of married life increased, they challenged the traditional courtship model, offering narratives based on repetition rather than progression. Beginning with English and French marital advice literature, which appropriated novelistic conventions at the same time that it cautioned readers about the dangers of novel reading, she looks at representations of ideal marriages in Pamela II and The New Heloise. Moving on from these ideal domestic spaces, bourgeois marriage is then problematized by the discourse of empire in Sir George Ellison and Letters of Mistress Henley, by troublesome wives in works by Richardson and Samuel de Constant, and by abusive husbands in works by Haywood, Edgeworth, Genlis and Restif de la Bretonne. Finally, the alternative marriage narrative, in which the adultery motif is incorporated into the marriage itself, redefines the function of heteronormativity. In exploring the theoretical issues that arise during this transitional period for married life and the marriage plot, Roulston expands the debates around the evolution of the modern couple.

Author : Michel Feher
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 1400 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Libertine Reader written by Michel Feher and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 1400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T– in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism.