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Author : Faith E. Beasley Publisher : University of Toronto Press Page : 382 pages File Size : 45,9 Mb Release : 2018-01-01 Category : History ISBN : 9781487502843
Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal by Faith E. Beasley Pdf
Challenging the prevailing images of India derived from nineteenth-century "orientalism," Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France's "Great Century."
Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal by Faith E. Beasley Pdf
Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France’s "Great Century" and the early Enlightenment. Focusing on the salon of Marguerite de La Sablière and its encounter with the traveler and philosopher François Bernier, this book resurrects the conversations about India inspired by Bernier’s travels and inscribed in his influential texts produced in collaboration with La Sablière’s salon. The literary works, correspondences, and philosophical texts produced by the members of this eclectic salon bear the traces of this engagement with India. Faith E. Beasley’s analysis of these conversations reveals France’s unique engagement with India during this period and challenges prevailing images derived from a nineteenth-century "orientalism" imbued with colonialism. The India encountered in La Sablière’s salon through Francois Bernier and others is not the colonized India that has come to dominate any image of the Orient. Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal adds a new chapter to literary and cultural history by adopting a new approach to the study of salon culture, exploring how texts, cultural artifacts, and patterns of thought were shaped by the collective reading and by the conversations emanating from these practices. Beasley’s analysis highlights the unique role of French salon culture in the evolution of western thought during the early modern period.
The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque by John D. Lyons Pdf
Few periods in history are so fundamentally contradictory as the Baroque, the culture flourishing from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in Europe. When we hear the term âBaroque,â the first images that come to mind are symmetrically designed gardens in French chateaux, scenic fountains in Italian squares, and the vibrant rhythms of a harpsichord. Behind this commitment to rule, harmony, and rigid structure, however, the Baroque also embodies a deep fascination with wonder, excess, irrationality, and rebellion against order. The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque delves into this contradiction to provide a sweeping survey of the Baroque not only as a style but also as a historical, cultural, and intellectual concept. With its thirty-eight chapters edited by leading expert John D. Lyons, the Handbook explores different manifestations of Baroque culture, from theatricality in architecture and urbanism to opera and dance, from the role of water to innovations in fashion, from mechanistic philosophy and literature to the tension between religion and science. These discussions present the Baroque as a broad cultural phenomenon that arose in response to the enormous changes emerging from the sixteenth century: the division between Catholics and Protestants, the formation of nation-states and the growth of absolutist monarchies, the colonization of lands outside Europe and the mutual impact of European and non-European cultures. Technological developments such as the telescope and the microscope and even greater access to high-quality mirrors altered mankindâs view of the universe and of human identity itself. By exploring the Baroque in relation to these larger social upheavals, this Handbook reveals a fresh and surprisingly modern image of the Baroque as a powerful response to an epoch of crisis.
French Global by Christie McDonald,Susan Suleiman Pdf
Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.
Author : Hall Bjørnstad Publisher : University of Chicago Press Page : 247 pages File Size : 46,8 Mb Release : 2021-10-15 Category : History ISBN : 9780226803975
The Dream of Absolutism examines the political aesthetics of power under Louis XIV. What was absolutism, and how did it work? What was the function of the ostentatious display surrounding Louis XIV at Versailles? What is gained—and what is lost—by approaching such expressions of absolutism as propaganda, as present-day scholars tend to do? In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjørnstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV’s reign was not top-down propaganda in any modern sense, but rather a dream dreamt collectively, by king, court, image-makers, and nation alike. Bjørnstad explores this dream through a sustained close analysis of a corpus of absolutist artifacts, ranging from Charles Le Brun’s famous paintings in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles via the king’s secret Mémoires to two little-known particularly extravagant verbal and textual celebrations of the king. The dream of absolutism, Bjørnstad concludes, lives at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. It is the carrier of a force that emerges as a glorious image; a participatory emotional reality that requires reality to conform to it. It is a dream, finally, that still shapes our collective political imaginary today.
Author : Harriet Stone Publisher : University of Toronto Press Page : 311 pages File Size : 52,8 Mb Release : 2019-04-08 Category : History ISBN : 9781487530150
Crowning Glories integrates Louis XIV’s propaganda campaigns, the transmission of Northern art into France, and the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century – three historical touchstones – to examine what it would have meant for France’s elite to experience the arts in France simultaneously with Netherlandish realist painting. In an expansive study of cultural life under the Sun King, Harriet Stone considers the monarchy’s elaborate palace decors, the court’s official records, and the classical theatre alongside Northern images of daily life in private homes, urban markets, and country fields. Stone argues that Netherlandish art assumes an unobtrusive yet, for the history of ideas, surprisingly dramatic role within the flourishing of the arts, both visual and textual, in France during Louis XIV’s reign. Netherlandish realist art represented thinking about knowledge that challenged the monarchy’s hold on the French imagination, and its efforts to impose the king’s portrait as an ideal and proof of his authority. As objects appreciated for their aesthetic and market value, Northern realist paintings assumed an uncontroversial place in French royal and elite collections. Flemish and Dutch still lifes, genre paintings, and cityscapes, however, were not merely accoutrements of power, acquisitions made by those with influence and money. Crowning Glories reveals how the empirical orientation of Netherlandish realism exposed French court society to a radically different mode of thought, one that would gain full expression in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.
The Throne of the Great Mogul in Dresden by Dror Wahrman Pdf
A masterful deciphering of an extraordinary art object, illuminating some of the biggest questions of the eighteenth century The Throne of the Great Mogul (1701-8) is a unique work of European decorative art: an intricate miniature of the court of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb depicted during the emperor's birthday celebrations. It was created by the jeweler Johann Melchior Dinglinger in Dresden and purchased by the Saxon prince Augustus the Strong for an enormous sum. Constructed like a theatrical set made of gold, silver, thousands of gemstones, and amazing enamel work, it consists of 164 pieces that together tell a detailed story. Why did Dinglinger invest so much time and effort in making this piece? Why did Augustus, in the midst of a political and financial crisis, purchase it? And why did the jeweler secrete in it messages wholly unrelated to the prince or to the Great Mogul? In answering these questions, Dror Wahrman, while shifting scales from microhistory to global history, opens a window onto major historical themes of the period: the nature of European absolutism, the princely politics of the Holy Roman Empire, the changing meaning of art in the West, the surprising emergence of a cross-continental lexicon of rulership shared across the Eastern Hemisphere, and the enactment in jewels and gold of quirky contemporary theories about the global history of religion.
The Ceremonial of Audience by Eva Orthmann,Anna Kollatz Pdf
Audiences are among the dominant elements of courtly life and may be referred to as a central aspect of representation of power in many societies. Audiences also served as a stage for negotiation and political decision-making. Beyond that, the ceremonial of audience acted as an integrative factor, strengthening the connections between the ruler and his subjects, the élite and his dynastic background. It thus reflects the structure, or at least the intended structure of rule, and allows us to get insight into the perception of the ruler in the respective society. This volume offers an approach to forms and structures of audiences in different epochs and regions. Choosing a transcultural and diachronic perspective, it aims at delineating similarities and differences as well as possible lines of development of the ceremonial on a broad basis of case studies. Audienzen gehören zu den prägenden Bestandteilen höfischen Lebens und können als zentraler Aspekt der Herrschaftsrepräsentation bezeichnet werden. Sie dienten aber nicht nur der Repräsentation, sondern waren auch Ort von Verhandlung und politischer Entscheidung. Hinzu trat die integrative Funktion der Audienz: Durch den Vollzug des Zeremoniells wurde auch die Verbindung des Herrschers zu seinen Untertanen, Vertrauten und zu seiner Dynastie dargestellt und gefestigt. Das Zeremoniell der Audienz spiegelt somit das (intendierte) Gefüge der Herrschaft, und lässt Rückschlüsse auf das Herrscherbild der jeweiligen Gesellschaft zu. Der Sammelband behandelt Formen und Strukturen des Audienz-Zeremoniells in transkultureller und diachroner Perspektive, in dem Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede, sowie Entwicklungslinien des Audienz-Zeremoniells auf einer breiten Basis von Fallbeispielen. Dazu versammelt er Beiträge zu unterschiedlichen Teilaspekten des Audienz-Zeremoniells in vormodernen Gesellschaften Europas, Asiens und des nördlichen Afrikas.
Networks, Interconnection, Connectivity by Ellen R. Welch,Michèle Longino Pdf
The map we draw of seventeenth-century French literary and intellectual culture is usually a small one, centered on Paris and Versailles to reflect the consolidation of intellectual and artistic capital under absolutism. Yet this process of centrali-zation depended on the creation of strong infrastructures connecting France's seat of political and cultural power to the provinces and the rest of the world: an efficient postal system, Europe's largest network of foreign embassies, trade links stretching to Asia and the Americas. How might a focus on these networks – and on the agents, materials, concepts, and practices that constituted them – broaden our mental topo-graphy of seventeenth-century French culture? This question animated a rich discussion during the May 2014 conference of the North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, held at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The present volume represents a selec-tion of the contributions to the conference.
India in Early Modern English Travel Writings by Rita Banerjee Pdf
Comparing the variant ideologies of the representations of India in seventeenth-century European travelogues, India in Early Modern English Travel Narratives concerns a relatively neglected area of study and often overlooked writers. Relating the narratives to contemporary ideas and beliefs, Rita Banerjee argues that travel writers, many of them avid Protestants, seek to negativize India by constructing her in opposition to Europe, the supposed norm, by deliberately erasing affinities and indulging in the politics of disavowal. However, some travelogues show a neutral stance by dispassionate ethnographic reporting, indicating a growing empirical trend. Yet others, influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of diversity, demonstrate tolerance of alien practices and, occasionally, acceptance of the superior rationality of the other's customs.
In Black Enlightenment Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh examines the works of such Black writers as the free Jamaican Francis Williams (1697–1762), Afro-British thinker Ignatius Sancho (1729?–1780), and Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), placing them alongside those of their white European contemporaries David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). By rethinking the Enlightenment and its canons, Parekh complicates common understandings of the Enlightenment wherein Black subjects could exist only in negation to white subjects. Black Enlightenment points to the anxiety of race in Hume, Kant, and others while showing the importance of Black Enlightenment thought. Parekh prompts us to consider the timeliness of reading Black Enlightenment authors who become “free” in a society hostile to that freedom.
Compassion's Edge traces the relation between compassion and toleration after France's Wars of Religion. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division. It provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.
Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, revised edition by Anne E. Duggan Pdf
The original edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, published in 2005, was a pathbreaking work of early modern literary history, exploring women’s role in the rise of the fairy tale and their use of this new genre to carve out roles as major contributors to the literature of their time. This new edition, with a new introduction and a forward by acclaimed scholar Allison Stedman, emphasizes the scholarly legacy of Anne Duggan’s original work, and its continuing field-changing implications. The book studies the works of two of the most prolific seventeenth-century women writers, Madeleine de Scudéry and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. Analyzing their use of the novel, the chronicle, and the fairy tale, Duggan examines how Scudéry and d'Aulnoy responded to and participated in the changes of their society, but from different generational and ideological positions. This study also takes into account the history of the salon, an unofficial institution that served as a locus for elite women's participation in the cultural and literary production of their society. In order to highlight the debates that emerged with the increased participation of aristocratic women within the public sphere, the book also explores the responses of two academicians, Nicolas Boileau and Charles Perrault.
The definitive guide to Molière's world and his afterlife, this is an accessible contextual guide for academics, undergraduates and theatre professionals alike. Interdisciplinary and diverse in scope, each chapter offers a different perspective on the social, cultural, intellectual, and theatrical environment within which Molière operated, as well as demonstrating his subsequent impact both within France and across the world. Offering fresh insight for those working in the fields of French Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies and French History, Molière in Context is an exceptional tribute to the premier French dramatist on the 400th anniversary of his birth.
The fascinating life of Frances Jennings, elder sister of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, charting her marriages and changes of fortune, her exile and return, her ambition, political manoeuvring and sincere piety.Frances Jennings, elder sister of Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, had an interesting and eventful life, most notably as the influential wife of Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, Catholic viceroy of Ireland under James II. Born circa 1649 into a Hertfordshire gentry family, she was a noted beauty at the Restoration court. There, she met and married George Hamilton, a Catholic officer who, after 1667, served in Louis XIV's army. In Paris, Frances raised three daughters, converted to Catholicism, and became an active member of the English Catholic émigré community. Following Hamilton's death, she remarried to Richard Talbot. As vicereine of Ireland, Frances helped re-establish Catholic hegemony, assisting in the foundation of convents and re-consecration of Christ Church cathedral. During the Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland (1689-91), Frances fled to James II's exiled court in France. In 1691, she received word that her husband, now Jacobite duke of Tyrconnell, had died. Attainted for high treason, she used the Marlboroughs' influence to recover her Irish estates. In 1708, she returned to Dublin, where she died in 1731. Highlighting Frances's political manoeuvrings, religious identity and deep family attachments, this book portrays a complex and contested figure, a woman who acted on multiple stages, in diverse roles, challenging expectations of rank, gender, and 'nationality' in unexpected ways.te-Jacobite War in Ireland (1689-91), Frances fled to James II's exiled court in France. In 1691, she received word that her husband, now Jacobite duke of Tyrconnell, had died. Attainted for high treason, she used the Marlboroughs' influence to recover her Irish estates. In 1708, she returned to Dublin, where she died in 1731. Highlighting Frances's political manoeuvrings, religious identity and deep family attachments, this book portrays a complex and contested figure, a woman who acted on multiple stages, in diverse roles, challenging expectations of rank, gender, and 'nationality' in unexpected ways.te-Jacobite War in Ireland (1689-91), Frances fled to James II's exiled court in France. In 1691, she received word that her husband, now Jacobite duke of Tyrconnell, had died. Attainted for high treason, she used the Marlboroughs' influence to recover her Irish estates. In 1708, she returned to Dublin, where she died in 1731. Highlighting Frances's political manoeuvrings, religious identity and deep family attachments, this book portrays a complex and contested figure, a woman who acted on multiple stages, in diverse roles, challenging expectations of rank, gender, and 'nationality' in unexpected ways.te-Jacobite War in Ireland (1689-91), Frances fled to James II's exiled court in France. In 1691, she received word that her husband, now Jacobite duke of Tyrconnell, had died. Attainted for high treason, she used the Marlboroughs' influence to recover her Irish estates. In 1708, she returned to Dublin, where she died in 1731. Highlighting Frances's political manoeuvrings, religious identity and deep family attachments, this book portrays a complex and contested figure, a woman who acted on multiple stages, in diverse roles, challenging expectations of rank, gender, and 'nationality' in unexpected ways.achments, this book portrays a complex and contested figure, a woman who acted on multiple stages, in diverse roles, challenging expectations of rank, gender, and 'nationality' in unexpected ways.