{"product_id":"unfinished-enlightenment","title":"Unfinished Enlightenment","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Unfinished Enlightenment\u003c\/i\u003e, Joanna Stalnaker offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier. \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eStalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the now habitual association between description and the novel was already firmly anchored in French culture, but just a century earlier, in the diverse network of articles on description in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and in the works derived from it, there was not a single mention of the novel. Instead, we find articles on description in natural history, geometry, belles-lettres, and poetry. Stalnaker builds on the premise that the tendency to view description as the inevitable (and subservient) partner of narration—rather than as a universal tool for making sense of knowledge in all fields—has obscured the central place of description in Enlightenment discourse. As a result, we have neglected some of the most original and experimental works of the eighteenth century.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54254028194136,"sku":"9780801448645","price":51.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780801448645.jpg?v=1778903156","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/unfinished-enlightenment","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}