{"product_id":"the-unfinished-enlightenment-9780801448645","title":"The Unfinished Enlightenment","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Joanna Stalnaker\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Cornell University Press\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Cornell University Press\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: European - French\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Unfinished Enlightenment\u003c\/i\u003e, Joanna Stalnaker offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the now habitual association between description and the novel was already firmly anchored in French culture, but just a century earlier, in the diverse network of articles on description in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclop�die and in the works derived from it, there was not a single mention of the novel. Instead, we find articles on description in natural history, geometry, belles-lettres, and poetry. Stalnaker builds on the premise that the tendency to view description as the inevitable (and subservient) partner of narration--rather than as a universal tool for making sense of knowledge in all fields--has obscured the central place of description in Enlightenment discourse. As a result, we have neglected some of the most original and experimental works of the eighteenth century.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":47582293065879,"sku":"9780801448645","price":6934.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9780801448645.webp?v=1774936016","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/the-unfinished-enlightenment-9780801448645","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}