Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Peter France
SeriesCambridge Studies in French
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:260
Dimensions(mm): Height 215,Width 139
Category/GenreLiterary studies - c 1500 to c 1800
ISBN/Barcode 9780521029865
ClassificationsDewey:840.935309033 840.935309033
Audience
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations Worked examples or Exercises

Publishing Details

Publisher Cambridge University Press
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publication Date 2 November 2006
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

This is a 1992 study of writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly in France, but also in Britain and Russia. Its focus is on the establishing and questioning of rational, 'civilized' norms of 'politeness', which in the ancien regime meant not just polite manners, but a certain ideal of society and culture. Within this general context, a series of familiar oppositions, between polite and rude, tame and wild, urban(e) and rustic, elite and popular, adult and child, reason and unreason, gives the initial impetus to enquiries which often show how these opposites interpenetrate, how hierarchies are reversed, and how compromises are sought. Polite society, like polite literature, needs and desires its opposite. The ideal is often the meeting of garden and wilderness, where the savage encounters the civilized and gifts are exchanged. Professor France points to the centrality, but also the vulnerability, in classical culture, of the ideal of 'politeness', and his discussion embraces revolutionary eloquence and enlightened primitivism, the value of hyperbole, and the essay as a form of polite sociability.

Reviews

"These well-crafted essays are particularly valuable for their breadth of scholarship and for the attention paid to minor writers or less well-known works of major figures...Politeness and Its Discontents is a valuable...contribution to the debate over the meaning and legacy of the Enlightenment." Julie C. Hayes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction