UID:
edocfu_9959155617302883
Umfang:
1 online resource (256 p.) :
,
5 halftones
ISBN:
9780801462344
Inhalt:
In The Unfinished Enlightenment, 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. Stalnaker 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.
Anmerkung:
Frontmatter --
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CONTENTS --
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FIGURES --
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PREFACE --
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --
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INTRODUCTION --
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Part I: Natural Histories --
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1. Buffon and Daubenton's Two Horses --
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2. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Strawberry Plant --
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Part II: Encyclopedias --
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3. Diderot's Word Machine --
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4. Delille's Little Encyclopedia --
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Part III: Moral and Political Topographies --
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5. Mercier's Unframed Paris --
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6. Description in Revolution --
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Conclusion: Virtual Encyclopedias --
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Bibliography --
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Index
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In English.
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.7591/9780801462344
URL:
https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801462344
