Taste in Eighteenth Century France

Taste in Eighteenth Century France PDF Author: Rémy Gilbert Saisselin
Publisher: Syracuse, N.Y., U. P
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description


Taste in Eighteenth Century France

Taste in Eighteenth Century France PDF Author: Rémy Gilbert Saisselin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aesthetics, French
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description


Taste in Eighteenth Century France: Critical Reflections on the Origins of Aesthetics

Taste in Eighteenth Century France: Critical Reflections on the Origins of Aesthetics PDF Author: R. G. Saisselin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aesthetics, French
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description


Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France

Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Christine Adams
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271026091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
This volume brings together eight essays (all but one previously unpublished) that offer innovative strategies for studying society and culture in eighteenth-century France. Divided into three sections, the chapters map out current research paths in social, cultural, and political history. The authors engage the most heated subjects of debate in the field today, including the changing nature of political life in the age of Enlightenment, the role of public opinion in undermining absolutism, and the impact of gender on social relationships and political language in the late eighteenth century. They demonstrate a marked interest in the lives of ordinary and humble French people, finding that exclusion from the main corridors of power fostered cunning and resourcefulness, not political indifference or ignorance. The articles encompass the Old Regime and the revolutionary era without falling into the teleological trap of using the former as the backdrop for the events of 1789. On the contrary, many of the authors consciously avoid this bias by investigating the Old Regime in its own right or by consciously linking the pre- and postrevolutionary eras. This decision alone marks an important turning of the tide. By establishing a dialogue between the Old Regime and the revolution, this volume implicitly pays homage to those historians who insist on the structural continuities that underlay the rupture of 1789. Contributors are Cissie Fairchilds, Christine Adams, Orest Ranum, Lisa Jane Graham, Harvey Chisick, John Garrigus, Lenard Berlanstein, and Jack Censer.

A Taste for Comfort and Status

A Taste for Comfort and Status PDF Author: Christine Adams
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271042907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
The Lamothes were an ordinary family in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. Well-to-do and well respected by their neighbors, they were local notables whose private and public lives suggest the importance of family, kin, and friendship networks, professional activities and cultural interests, as well as a desire to serve the public good. In this portrait of the Lamothes, Christine Adams explores the development of middle-class identity among urban professionals and reconsiders the role of this social group in the coming French Revolution. The most striking feature of this family history is that it is based on more than three hundred personal letters that circulated among the Lamothes&—parents and seven siblings&—over a period of twenty-five years. Such a collection is rare for this period, and Adams makes the most of it. Her study lends remarkable texture to provincial middle-class life. She weaves these letters into every aspect of the Lamothes' experience&—professional, literary, intellectual, social, and civic. She demonstrates a sustained mobilization of all family skills and resources to maintain the status of the males of the family and preserve (rather than risk) the family's emotional and material stability. While their conservative lifestyle suggests that the Lamothes were not &"revolutionary,&" they were, nonetheless, part of the bourgeoisie. Adams thus taps into a potent debate about middle-class consciousness and identity in the eighteenth century, arguing against those historians who doubt that such a social class existed in France before 1789.

The Bad Taste of Others

The Bad Taste of Others PDF Author: Jennifer Tsien
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220512X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
An act of bad taste was more than a faux pas to French philosophers of the Enlightenment. To Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and others, bad taste in the arts could be a sign of the decline of a civilization. These intellectuals, faced with the potential chaos of an expanding literary market, created seals of disapproval in order to shape the literary and cultural heritage of France in their image. In The Bad Taste of Others Jennifer Tsien examines the power of ridicule and exclusion to shape the period's aesthetics. Tsien reveals how the philosophes consecrated themselves as the protectors of true French culture modeled on the classical, the rational, and the orderly. Their anxiety over the invasion of the Republic of Letters by hordes of hacks caused them to devise standards that justified the marginalization of worldy women, "barbarians," and plebeians. While critics avoided strict definitions of good taste, they wielded the term "bad taste" against all popular works they wished to erase from the canon of French literature, including Renaissance poetry, biblical drama, the burlesque theater of the previous century, the essays of Montaigne, and genres associated with the so-called précieuses. Tsien's study draws attention to long-disregarded works of salon culture, such as the énigmes, and offers a new perspective on the critical legacy of Voltaire. The philosophes' open disdain for the undiscerning reading public challenges the belief that the rise of aesthetics went hand in hand with Enlightenment ideas of equality and relativism.

French taste in the eighteenth century

French taste in the eighteenth century PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description


Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France

Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France PDF Author: Michael Moriarty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521113366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion of 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general.

Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century

Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Madeleine Delpierre
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300071283
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
Examines European dress as it evolved in 18th-century France. The text looks at French dress first from an aesthetic point of view, describing in detail fashionable and everyday clothes. It then examines the social and economic factors affecting fashion and compares styles in major European cities.

Learned and General Musical Taste in Eighteenth-century France

Learned and General Musical Taste in Eighteenth-century France PDF Author: William Weber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Book Description