In 1789 French revolutionaries initiated a cultural experiment that radically transformed the most basic elements of French literary civilization—authorship, printing, and publishing. In a panoramic analysis, Carla Hesse tells how the Revolution shook the Parisian printing and publishing world from top to bottom, liberating the trade from absolutist institutions and inaugurating a free-market exchange of ideas. Historians and literary critics have traditionally viewed the French Revolution as a catastrophe for French literary culture. Combing through extensive new archival sources, Hesse finds instead that revolutionaries intentionally dismantled the elite literary civilization of the Old Regime to create unprecedented access to the printed word. Exploring the uncharted terrains of popular fiction, authors' rights, and literary life under the Terror, Carla Hesse offers a new perspective on the relationship between democratic revolutions and modern cultural life.

Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

History

Hesse, Carla

Europe

University of California Press

Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 (Volume 12) (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

From the Back Cover\n"A book whose implications extend far beyond the geographical and temporal boundaries of its subject. Anyone who wishes to know the answer to Foucault's famous question, 'What is an author?,' should start here with Hesse's illuminating study of the transformation of the author from the privileged creation of the absolutist state, to the civic hero of public enlightenment, to the bourgeois head of household. . . . The consequences of the political, economic, and ideological struggles so brilliantly explored in this book continue to shape our own cultural politics."—Stephen Greenblatt, author of Shakespearean Negotiations\nIn 1789, French revolutionaries initiated a cultural experiment that radically transformed the three basic elements of French literary civilization—authorship, printing, and publishing. In a panoramic analysis, Carla Hesse tells how the Revolution shook the Parisian printing and publishing world from top to bottom, liberating the trade from absolutist institutions and inaugurating a free-market exchange of ideas.\nHistorians and literary critics have traditionally viewed the French Revolution as a catastrophe for French literary culture. Combing through extensive archival sources, Hesse finds instead that revolutionaries intentionally dismantled the elite literary civilization of the Old Regime to create unprecedented access to the printed word. Exploring the uncharted terrains of popular fiction, authors' rights, and literary life under the Terror, Hesse offers a new perspective on the relationship between democratic revolutions and modern cultural life. 
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) (Volume 12)

In 1789, French revolutionaries initiated a cultural experiment that radically transformed the three basic elements of French literary civilization--authorship, printing, and publishing. In a panoramic analysis, Carla Hesse tells how the Revolution shook the Parisian printing and publishing world from top to bottom, liberating the trade from absolutist institutions and inaugurating a free-market exchange of ideas. &nbsp; Historians and literary critics have traditionally viewed the French Revolution as a catastrophe for French literary culture. Combing through extensive archival sources, Hesse finds instead that revolutionaries intentionally dismantled the elite literary civilization of the Old Regime to create unprecedented access to the printed word. Exploring the uncharted terrains of popular fiction, authors' rights, and literary life under the Terror, Hesse offers a new perspective on the relationship between democratic revolutions and modern cultural life. <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.</div>

The French Revolution created a new cultural world that freed women from the constraints of corporate privilege, aristocratic salons, and patriarchal censorship, even though it failed to grant them legal equality. Women burst into print in unprecedented numbers and became active participants in the great political, ethical, and aesthetic debates that gave birth to our understanding of the individual as a self-creating, self-determining agent. Carla Hesse tells this story, delivering a capacious history of how French women have used writing to create themselves as modern individuals.
 Beginning with the marketplace fishwives and salon hostesses whose eloquence shaped French culture low and high and leading us through the accomplishments of Simone de Beauvoir, Hesse shows what it meant to make an independent intellectual life as a woman in France. She offers exquisitely constructed portraits of the work and mental lives of many fascinating women--including both well-known novelists and now-obscure pamphleteers--who put pen to paper during and after the Revolution. We learn how they negotiated control over their work and authorial identity--whether choosing pseudonyms like Georges Sand or forsaking profits to sign their own names. We encounter the extraordinary Louise de Kéralio-Robert, a critically admired historian who re-created herself as a revolutionary novelist. We meet aristocratic women whose literary criticism subjected them to slander as well as writers whose rhetoric cost them not only reputation but marriage, citizenship, and even their heads.
 Crucially, their stories reveal how the unequal terms on which women entered the modern era shaped how they wrote and thought. Though women writers and thinkers championed the full range of political and social positions--from royalist to Jacobin, from ultraconservative to fully feminist--they shared common moral perspectives and representational strategies. Unlike the Enlightenment of their male peers, theirs was more skeptical than idealist, more situationalist than universalist. And this alternative project lies at the very heart of modern French letters.

The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern.

Princeton University Press

The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern

This book is a special issue of French Historical Studies.

Mobility in French History (Volume 29)

Duke University Press Books

Rousseau et la Révolution

Arts & Photography

COLLECTIFS

Swenson, James

Wahnich, Sophie

Boudon, Julien

Carbonnières, Philippe de

Berchtold, Jacques

MAZAURIC, Claude

Simonin, Anne

History & Criticism

Gallimard]

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