Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
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Narrative, catastrophe and historicity in eighteenth-century French literature (Paperback)
Loot Price: R2,607
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Narrative, catastrophe and historicity in eighteenth-century French literature (Paperback)
Series: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2022:02
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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How do communities tell and retell stories of catastrophe to
explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their
survival? This book contends that such stories are central to how
communities claim a position within history. It explores this
question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives
produced in eighteenth-century France: a tumultuous period when a
new understanding of a properly 'modern' national history was being
elaborated. Who gets to belong to the modern era? And who or what
is relegated to a gothic, barbarous or medieval past? Is an
enlightened future assured, or is a return to a Dark Age
inevitable? Following barbarians, bastards, usurpers, prophets and
Revolutionary martyrs through stories of catastrophes real and
imagined, the book traces how narrative temporalities become
historicities: visions of the laws which govern the past, present
and future. Ultimately it argues that the complex temporality of
catastrophe offers a privileged insight into how a modern French
historical consciousness was formed out of the multiple pasts and
possible futures that coexisted alongside the age of Enlightenment.
Further, examining the tension between a desire to place the
imagined community definitively beyond catastrophic times, and a
fascination with catastrophe in its revelatory or regenerative
aspect, it offers an important historical perspective on the
presence of this same tension in the stories of catastrophe that we
tell in our own multiple, tumultuous present.
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