Full Description
Many French Enlightenment thinkers sculpted their identity and projected their ideas into the future via reflection on the past, despite their rhetoric of rupture and rejection of tradition. Emphasizing the entangled nature of eighteenth-century thought and its reception, Cultural transmission and the French Enlightenment: repurposing the past asks where the past ends and its interpretation begins, illuminating the myriad material forms of knowledge and their circulation across geographical space and time. The contributing authors uncover and interrogate the cultural assumptions of both the French Enlightenment and its afterlife. Each essay examines this process of cultural transmission and the ramifications today of the continued sourcing of ideas generated during the Enlightenment. Bringing together perspectives ranging from literary studies, to history of science and theater studies, the authors of this volume interpret the Enlightenment through its continuity rather than as a set of fixed, universal values. Instead of accepting or contesting Western society and politics as the apogee of progress, and seeking an intellectual past by which to define the present, such approaches situate the Enlightenment in a longer chain of invention, repurposing, and reception.
Contents
Figures and tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: reading cultural transmission through entngled histories - Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee
Eighteenth-century French literary portraits: the repurposing of a seventeenth-century socialite practice - Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti
Chemical manipulations of nature: new social categories in Diderot's Encyclopédie - Célia Abele
Medicine: physicians use their history to promote enlightenment - Kathleen Wellman
Religion: moral philosophy in the Encyclopédie d'Yverdon - Clorinda Donato
Sociability: pleasure, violence, and theater on the militarized French periphery - Logan J. Connors
Re-performance: navigating the ethics and aesthetics of Enlightenment dance performance for the contemporary stage - Amanda Danielle Moehlenpah
Misanthropy: Mercier mobilizes Shakespeare against the Revolution - Joseph Harris
An unexpected journey: from Jean-Jacques;s intent to Rousseau's legacy in late eighteenth-century France - Clovis Gladstone
Voltaire's fanaticism, then and now - Annelle Curulla
Feminisms: gendered appraoches to French universalism(s) - Valentina Denzel and Tracy Rutler
Victor Klemperer on Voltaire and Rousseau: the French Enlightenment and German-Jewish autobiographical writing under the Third Reich - Arvi Sepp
Bibliography
