This book rescues Joubert from the ranks of minor French moralistes and by tracing the development of his thought, from his time as secretary to Diderot through the period of his association with Chateaubriand, demonstrates that he was a writer on aesthetics of considerable sensitivity. Reading widely among philosophers and poets from Plato and Homer to Kant and Andre Chenier, Joubert consigned his thoughts and perceptions to a series of carnets which form the basis of this study and bear witness to an unusually eclectic and enquiring mind. Kinloch shows that Joubert's significance is not...

Hawcroft presents an exploration of the theatrical qualities of the language of France's greatest tragedian, Jean Racine, taking as its analytical tool two neglected parts of rhetoric--inventio and dispositio. Racine's dialogue is exciting, Hawcroft argues, because he makes persuasive interaction of characters a key feature of his dramatic technique. This book shows how Racine deploys persuasion in well-defined contexts: trials, embassies, and councils; informal oratory as protagonists try to manipulate each other and their confidants in order to make their own views and wishes prevail;...

For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe has somehow remained separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analyzed. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, Goethe and...

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of Italian Renaissance ideas on literary imitation, the key critical concept of the period. Covering both theory and practice, and both Latin and the vernacular, McLaughlin charts the development of the concept from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, offering fresh insights into major works of Italian literature from Dante to Bembo.

This is the first comparative study of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, two crucial texts in aesthetic and cultural theory. Martin's scrupulous examination and comparison reveals the common ground shared by the two writers, who are usually regarded as being poles apart. In addition, Martin shows how this common ground mutually illuminates both texts.

Descriptions of imaginary buildings abound in late medieval and early modern texts in France. This book examines the reasons for their popularity and analyzes the way in which metaphors of the building were used by writers as a tools of persuasion. One such writer was Jean Lemaire (c.1473-after 1515) who used architectural metaphor both to praise his patrons and to advertise his own talents, while drawing on and transforming a tradition of writing popularized by his rhetoriqueur predecessors.
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This study suggests that Hugo von Hofmannsthal's early interest in the works of the French Symbolists had an inhibiting effect on his own poetry and contributed to the famous "Chandos crisis" in 1902.

"Linguistic" theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as "aesthetic" theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question "what is beauty?," but formulated, also, to respond to contemporary concerns. Edward Nye considers a wide range of authors from these two perspectives and draws the following conclusions: etymology is a theory of poetry, dictionaries of synonymy, prosody and metaphor are theories of preciosity, and Sensualism is a theory of artistic representation.

This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of postcoloniality. Through readings of Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, Jeannie Suk illuminates how debates about negritude, antillanite, and creolite contribute to paradoxes at the heart of postcolonial modes.
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This book is a comparative study in the history of ideas. It is an innovative examination of the intellectual background, affiliations and contexts of two major twentieth-century thinkers and an historical interpretation of their work in aesthetics, cultural theory, literary history, and philosophy.
Unlike all existing texts on Lukacs and Bakhtin, this book offers a comparison of their writings at different stages of their intellectual development and in the broad context of the ideas of their time. The book introduces unknown archival material and discusses hitherto disregarded or...