"Linguistic" theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as "aesthetic" theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question "what is beauty?," but formulated, also, to respond to contemporary concerns. Edward Nye considers a wide range of authors from these two perspectives and draws the following conclusions: etymology is a theory of poetry, dictionaries of synonymy, prosody and metaphor are theories of preciosity, and Sensualism is a theory of artistic representation.
Zhivov's magisterial work tells the story of the creation of a new vernacularliterary language in modern Russia, an achievement arguably on a par with thenation's extraordinary military successes, territorial expansion, developmentof the arts, and formation of a modern empire.
Reading 1759 investigates the literary culture of a remarkable year in British and French history, writing, and ideas. Familiar to many as the British “year of victories” during the Seven Years’ War, 1759 was also an important year in the histories of fiction, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Reading 1759 is the first book to examine together the range of works written and published during this crucial year. Offering broad coverage of the year’s work in writing, these essays examine key works by Johnson, Voltaire, Sterne, Adam Smith, Edward Young, Sarah Fielding, and Christopher Smart, along with such group projects as the Encyclopédie and the literary review journals of the mid-eighteenth century. Organized around a cluster of key topics, the volume reflects the concerns most important to writers themselves in 1759. This was a year of the new and the modern, as writers addressed current issues of empire and ethical conduct, forged new forms of creative expression, and grappled with the nature of originality itself. Texts written and published in 1759 confronted the history of Western colonialism, the problem of prostitution in a civilized society, and the limitations of linguistic expression. Philosophical issues were also important in 1759, not least the thorny question of causation; while, in France, state censorship challenged the Encyclopédie, the central Enlightenment project. Taking into its purview such texts and intellectual developments, Reading 1759 puts the literary culture of this singular, and singularly important, year on the scholarly map. In the process, the volume also provides a self-reflective contribution to the growing body of “annualized” studies that focus on the literary output of specific years.
From the 1750s to the 1830s, numerous British intellectuals, novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, translators, educationalists, politicians, businessmen, travel writers, and philosophers brooded about the merits and demerits of the French language. The decades under consideration encompass a particularly tumultuous period in Anglo-French relations that witnessed the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1802 and 1803-1815, respectively), the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830), and the July Revolution (1830) - not to mention the gradual expansion of the British Empire, and the complex cultural shifts that led from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. In this book, Marcus Tomalin reassesses the ways in which writers such as Tobias Smollett, Maria Edgeworth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Cobbett, and William Hazlitt acquired and deployed French. This intricate topic is examined from a range of critical perspectives, which draw upon recent research into European Romanticism, linguistic historiography, comparative literature, social and cultural history, education theory, and translation studies. This interdisciplinary approach helps to illuminate the deep ambivalences that characterised British appraisals of the French language in the literature of the Romantic period.
The apparent self-sufficiency of joie de vivre means that, despite the widespread use of the phrase since the late nineteenth century, the concept has rarely been explored critically. Joie de vivre does not readily surrender itself to examination, for it is in a sense too busy being what it is. However, as the essays in this collection reveal, joie de vivre can be as complex and variable a state as the more negative emotions or experiences that art and literature habitually evoke. This volume provides an urgently needed study of an intriguing and under-explored area of French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. While the range and content of contributions embraces linguistics, literature, art, sport and politics, the starting point is, like that of the term joie de vivre itself, in French language and culture. This volume will be of special interest to researchers across the full range of French studies, from literature and language to cultural studies. It will be of direct appeal to specialist readers, university libraries, graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers with a lively interest in French literature and culture of the medieval, early modern and broad modern periods. This book's fresh perspectives on the theme of joie de vivre and its relation to questions of privacy, contemplation, voyeurism, feasting and nationhood will also be of relevance to researchers in comparative and cognate disciplines.
Highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. Argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'.
From the book: "Paris was fond of stormy weather and emerging toads; the thirst for knowledge was supreme, and the first to read and reread the news were the first to render it with criticism. Authors and readers, great and small, all shared the impression that they were caught between truth and falsehood, and moreover that the 'probable-improbable' they relished so much was being manipulated by the complex strategies of the court, the police and the petty hordes of the evil-minded. We cannot understand the curiosity of the Parisian public without realizing that they did at least know one thing: the extent they were being made fools of." The eighteenth century was awash with rumor and talk. The words and opinions of ordinary people filled the streets of Paris. But were these simply the isolated grumblings and gossip of the crowd, or is it possible to speak of genuine "public opinion" among the common people? This is the subject of Subversive Words, the newest book by French historian Arlette Farge. Farge begins with Jürgen Habermas's notion of a bourgeois public sphere. However, whereas Habermas was concerned mostly with the "cultured classes," Farge focuses on the uneducated common people. Drawing on chronicles, newspapers, memoirs, police reports, and news sheets from the time, she finds that by the second half of the eighteenth century ordinary Parisians had come to assert their right to hold and declare clear opinions on what was happening in their city--visible, real, everyday events such as executions, price rises, and revolts. Yet the government preferred to regard ordinary Parisians as unsophisticated, impulsive, or inept. In the years leading up to the Revolution, however, the administration increasingly feared the mobilization of these people. Officially, it denied the existence of any distinct popular public opinion, but in practice it kept the streets of Paris under regular surveillance through a system of spies, inspectors, and observers. Amid this curious tension between denial and action, Farge argues, popular rumors arose and gained a life of their own. Wise and filled with vivid descriptions of everyday life, Subversive Words is cultural and intellectual history at its best.
How do translators manage relations with parties in a position of authority and power? The book investigates the intellectual, social and professional identity of translators and interpreters across different time periods and locations when their role involves a negotiation with political powers and cultural authorities.
The market for print steadily expanded throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world thanks to printers' efforts to ensure that ordinary people knew how to read and use printed matter. Reading is and was a collection of practices, performed in diverse but always very specific ways. These practices were spread down the social hierarchy through printed guides. Eve Tavor Bannet explores guides to six manners or methods of reading, each with its own social, economic, commercial, intellectual and pedagogical functions, and each promoting a variety of fragmentary and discontinuous reading practices. The increasingly widespread production of periodicals, pamphlets, prefaces, conduct books, conversation-pieces and fictions, together with schoolbooks designed for adults and children, disseminated all that people of all ages and ranks might need or wish to know about reading, and prepared them for new jobs and roles both in Britain and America.
