At home in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, Robert Darnton is a shrewd and entertaining guide to the shifting borderlands of history and culture. These wide-ranging essays appear under various headings: "Current Events" --this section includes the wonderful story of the moment in 1792 when all the delegates in the French Legislative Assembly kissed each other; "Media," on television, pounding a newspaper beat, and tips to academics on how to get a book published; "The Printed Word," with an essay on the history of books; "The Lay of the Land," on aspects of intellectual history;...
At home in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, Robert Darnton is a shrewd and entertaining guide to the shifting borderlands of history and cu...
Shock waves from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 continue to pulse through German society. As the difficult process of reunification continues, it is worth recalling the revolutionary moment when immense crowds took to the streets of Leipzig and Berlin under the banner "We Are the People" and brought down one of the world's most oppressive dictatorships. Robert Darnton's eyewitness account of those historic days "is direct and vivid. His prose conveys the immediacy of the drama." He gives us a memorable cast of characters, from two experts on the repair of broken-down Trabis to...
Shock waves from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 continue to pulse through German society. As the difficult process of reunification cont...
French literature of the eighteenth century means to us today Rousseau and Voltaire and the "classic" texts that, we imagine, gave rise to the Revolution. Yet very few of the standard works of the Enlightenment were as widely read as books whose names we have never heard, books that were the currency of a huge literary underground during the reign of Louis XVI. Included in this volume are Darnton's translations of excerpts from three of these works After twenty-five years of research, Darnton has summarized his findings in one brilliant work that examines the reciprocal relationship between...
French literature of the eighteenth century means to us today Rousseau and Voltaire and the "classic" texts that, we imagine, gave rise to the Revolut...
Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.
Here are the ambitious writers who crowded into Paris seeking fame and fortune within the Republic of Letters, but who instead sank into the miserable world of Grub Street-victims of a closed world of protection and privilege. Venting their frustrations in an illicit literature of vitriolic pamphlets, libelles, and chroniques scandaleuses, these "Rousseaus of the...
Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spi...
Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, arrived in Paris and began to promulgate a somewhat exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Robert Darnton, in his lively study of mesmerism and its relation to eighteenth-century radical political thought and popular scientific notions, provides a useful contribution to the study of popular culture and the manner in which ideas are diffused down through various social levels.
Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, arrived in Paris and began to promulgate a somewhat exotic theory of healing that almost imme...
A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Darnton's history of the Encyclopedie is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale, a history of the process of civilization.
In tracing the...
A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Darnton's history of the Encyclopedie is such an occasion. The author...
With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways.
In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot's great Encyclopedie by hiding the banned project's papers in his Paris townhouse. Relationships at court...
With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression i...
