Politeness and its Discontents

Problems in French Classical Culture

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Hardcover | 9 March 1992

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Hardcover
260 Pages

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21.59 x 13.97 x 1.91

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This is a 1992 study of writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly in France, but also in Britain and Russia. Its focus is on the establishing and questioning of rational, 'civilized' norms of 'politeness', which in the ancien r©gime meant not just polite manners, but a certain ideal of society and culture. Within this general context, a series of familiar oppositions, between polite and rude, tame and wild, urban(e) and rustic, ©lite and popular, adult and child, reason and unreason, gives the initial impetus to enquiries which often show how these opposites interpenetrate, how hierarchies are reversed, and how compromises are sought. Polite society, like polite literature, needs and desires its opposite. The ideal is often the meeting of garden and wilderness, where the savage encounters the civilized and gifts are exchanged. Professor France points to the centrality, but also the vulnerability, in classical culture, of the ideal of 'politeness', and his discussion embraces revolutionary eloquence and enlightened primitivism, the value of hyperbole, and the essay as a form of polite sociability.

Industry Reviews

"These well-crafted essays are particularly valuable for their breadth of scholarship and for the attention paid to minor writers or less well-known works of major figures...Politeness and Its Discontents is a valuable...contribution to the debate over the meaning and legacy of the Enlightenment." Julie C. Hayes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

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Non-Fiction Philosophy Ethics & Moral Philosophy History Regional & National History European History Literature, Poetry & Plays History & Criticism of Literature General Literary Studies Literary Studies from 1500 to 1800

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Excess and Unreason
Hyperbole
Ogres
Myth and modernity: Racine's PhFdre
Enlightened Sociability
Polish, police, polis
The sociable essayist: Addison and Marivaux
The commerce of the self
The writer as performer
Beyond politeness? Speaker and audience at the Convention Natinale
Confronting the Other
Translating the British
Jacques or his master? Diderot and the peasants
Enlightened primitivism
Frontiers of civilization
Notes
Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Politeness and its Discontents

Problems in French Classical Culture

At a Glance

Hardcover

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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