Politeness and its Discontents
Problems in French Classical Culture

A 1992 study of the place and nature of the ideal of politeness in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing in France, Britain and Russia.

Peter France (Author)

9780521370707, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 January 1992

260 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

"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

This is a 1992 study of writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly in France, but also in Britain and Russia. Its focus is on the establishing and questioning of rational, 'civilized' norms of 'politeness', which in the ancien régime meant not just polite manners, but a certain ideal of society and culture. Within this general context, a series of familiar oppositions, between polite and rude, tame and wild, urban(e) and rustic, élite and popular, adult and child, reason and unreason, gives the initial impetus to enquiries which often show how these opposites interpenetrate, how hierarchies are reversed, and how compromises are sought. Polite society, like polite literature, needs and desires its opposite. The ideal is often the meeting of garden and wilderness, where the savage encounters the civilized and gifts are exchanged. Professor France points to the centrality, but also the vulnerability, in classical culture, of the ideal of 'politeness', and his discussion embraces revolutionary eloquence and enlightened primitivism, the value of hyperbole, and the essay as a form of polite sociability.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]