Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

Esthetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment

by Thomas M. Kavanagh
Save 17% Save 17%
Current price ₹7,361.00
Original price ₹8,834.00
Original price ₹8,834.00
Original price ₹8,834.00
(-17%)
₹7,361.00
Current price ₹7,361.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780812233797
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
  • Publisher Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 304
  • Original Price: USD 74.95
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 681 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Movements / Baroque & Rococo

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 artistic culture, Kavanagh argues against the traditional view of the Age of Reason as one of coherent, recognizable ideology expressed in a structured narrative form. In literature, he analyzes the moment at work in the inebriating lightness of Marivaux's repartee; the new-found freedom of Lahontan's and Rousseau's ideals of a consciousness limited to the present; Diderot's championing of Epicurean epistemology; Graffigny's portrayal of abrupt cultural displacement; and Casanova's penchant for chance's redefining moment. The moment in art theory and practice is explored in such forms as de Piles's defense of color; Du Bos's foregrounding of perception; Watteau's indulgence in a corporeal present; Chardin's dismantling of mimesis; and Boucher's and Fragonard's thematics of desire.

Thomas M. Kavanagh is Professor of French at Yale University. Among his previous books is Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us