Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France
Regular price
€107.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
17th-century literature
18th-century literature
A01=Ann T. Delehanty
Author_Ann T. Delehanty
Category=DSA
Category=DSB
eighteenth-century literature
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Francophone Literature
Literary Studies
literary theory
philosophy of aesthetics
seventeenth-century literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781611484892
- Weight: 472g
- Dimensions: 160 x 237mm
- Publication Date: 19 Dec 2012
- Publisher: Associated University Presses
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France analyzes the work of several literary critics in France and England, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, who were inspired by the idea that literature – especially the literary sublime – might offer us the deepest kind of knowledge. Dominique Bouhours, Nicolas Boileau, René Rapin, John Dennis, and the abbé Dubos believed that literature could deliver truths that transcend our world and were analogous or even equal to the truths of divine revelation. Ann Delehanty argues that this shift towards the transcendental realm pushed the definition of the literary work away from describing its objective properties and towards its effects on the mind of the reader. After placing these ideas about literature in the context of the religious and philosophical thinking of Blaise Pascal, Delehanty traces the evolution of a debate about literature in the writings of the critics in question. They embraced theories of sentiment and the passions as the epistemological means of identifying and knowing the transcendental aspects of a literary work that eventually came to be known as aesthetics. By tracing the historical evolution of the relationship between transcendentalism and aesthetics in French and English neoclassical thought, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France provides new and engaging insights into an important moment in our literary history.
Ann T. Delehanty is associate professor of French and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
