Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture

by Peter France

Overview

A study of the place and nature of the ideal of politeness in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writing in France, Britain and Russia. This ideal covered not just polite manners, but all the "civilized" norms of society and culture, as opposed to elements considered childish, irrational, savage or vulgar. Professor France shows how interpenetration and compromise between polite and rude, tame and wild, are central features of classical writings, arguing that polite society needed and desired its opposite.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521370707
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/09/1992
Series:	Cambridge Studies in French , #35
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Excess and Unreason: 1. Hyperbole; 2. Ogres; 3. Myth and modernity: Racine's Phèdre; Part II. Enlightened Sociability: 4. Polish, police, polis; 5. The sociable essayist: Addison and Marivaux; 6. The commerce of the self; 7. The writer as performer; 8. Beyond politeness? Speakers and audience at the Convention Nationale; Part III. Confronting the Other: 9. Translating the British; 10. Jacques or his master? Diderot and the peasants; 11. Enlightened primitivism; 12. Frontiers of civilization; Notes; Index.

Editorial 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

From the Publisher