Dice, Cards, Wheels A Different History of French Culture Thomas M. Kavanagh "With his connoisseur's knowledge (and manifest love) of the rules, and ruses, of games and the culture that they shape, Kavanagh makes a convincing case that gambling ought to be considered not a moral failing or individual pathology but a conspicuous, and uncommonly revelatory, practice that sets the social scene that it dramatizes."--Journal of Modern History Gambling has been a practice central to many cultures throughout history. In Dice, Cards, Wheels, Thomas M. Kavanagh scrutinizes the changing...
Dice, Cards, Wheels A Different History of French Culture Thomas M. Kavanagh "With his connoisseur's knowledge (and manifest love) of the rules, and r...
Novelists, artists, and philosophers of the eighteenth century understood pleasure as a virtue--a gift to be shared with one's companion, with a reader, or with the public. In this daring new book, Thomas Kavanagh overturns the prevailing scholarly tradition that views eighteenth-century France primarily as the incubator of the Revolution. Instead, Kavanagh demonstrates how the art and literature of the era put the experience of pleasure at the center of the cultural agenda, leading to advances in both ethics and aesthetics.
Kavanagh shows that pleasure is not necessarily hedonistic...
Novelists, artists, and philosophers of the eighteenth century understood pleasure as a virtue--a gift to be shared with one's companion, with a re...
The literature and art of the French Enlightenment is everywhere marked by an intense awareness of the moment. The parallel projects of living in, representing, and learning from the moment run through the Enlightenment's endeavors as tokens of an ambition and a heritage imposing its only and ultimately impossible cohesion. In this illuminating study, Thomas M. Kavanagh argues that Enlightenment culture and its tensions, contradictions, and achievements flow from a subversive attention to the present as present, freed from the weight of past and future. Examining a wide sweep of literary and...
The literature and art of the French Enlightenment is everywhere marked by an intense awareness of the moment. The parallel projects of living in, rep...
