Styles of Enlightenment

Elena Russo is a professor of 17th- and 18th-century French literature at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several books, including La Cour et la ville de la litterature classique aux Lumieres and S keptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPrologue: Boudoir and Tribune1. A Faded Coquette: Marivaux and the Philosophes2. Fakes, Impostors, and Beaux Esprits: Conversation's Backstage3. The Sly and the Coy Mistress: Style and Manner from Fénelon to Diderot4. Capturing Fireside Conversation: Diderot and Marivaux's Stylistic Challenge5. Grace and the Epistemology of Confused Perception6. Between Paris and Rome: Montesquieu's Poetry of History7. Montesquieu for the Masses, or Implanting False Memory8. Everlasting Theatricality: Arlequin and the Untamed ParterreEpilogue: The Costume of ModernityNotesIndex

Clear, well-documented book... Highly recommended. Choice 2007 Illuminating and original, Styles of Enlightenment is a welcome addition to eighteenth-century studies. -- Julia Douthwaite Clio 2007 This absorbing, well-written study will be of tremendous interest to a wide range of readers. -- Geoffrey Turnovsky H-France 2008 The success of the book lies in Russo's ability to stitch together eighteenth-century literary and ethical theory with Augustinian theology and sociology. -- N.B. Leddy Modern Language Review 2008 What makes her contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship particularly noteworthy, even groundbreaking, is the new light it sheds on the entire movement of ideas known as the Enlightenment. -- Karlis Racevskis Substance 2008 Drawing on recent scholarship by Jay Caplan, Gregory Brown, and Joan DeJean, as well as on an abundance of lively quotations from the literature and art criticism of this period, Russo demonstrates that the philosophes' lofty condemnation of modern taste did not prevent them from succumbing to its appeal. -- Giulia Pacini Eighteenth-Century Life 2009 Russo offers a new and critical perspective on the Enlightenment. -- Rori Bloom South Atlantic Review 2008 Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France rewrites the history of a style that has all too often been dismissed as a marginal by-product of a decadent Regency. -- Giulia Paccini Eighteenth-Century Life