Politeness and its discontents : problems in French classical culture

Resource Information

The work Politeness and its discontents : problems in French classical culture represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Politeness and its discontents : problems in French classical culture

Title remainder

problems in French classical culture

Statement of responsibility

Peter France

Creator

• France, Peter, 1935-
• France, Peter, 1935-

Subject

• European literature -- French influences
• France -- Civilization -- 18th century
• French literature -- 17th century -- History and criticism
• French literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism
• French literature -- European influences
• Literature and society -- France
• Social ethics in literature
• Classicism -- France
• Courtesy in literature

Language

eng

Summary

This is a 1992 study of writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly in France, but also in Britain and Russia. Its focus is on the establishing and questioning of rational, 'civilized' norms of 'politeness', which in the ancien régime meant not just polite manners, but a certain ideal of society and culture. Within this general context, a series of familiar oppositions, between polite and rude, tame and wild, urban(e) and rustic, élite and popular, adult and child, reason and unreason, gives the initial impetus to enquiries which often show how these opposites interpenetrate, how hierarchies are reversed, and how compromises are sought. Polite society, like polite literature, needs and desires its opposite. The ideal is often the meeting of garden and wilderness, where the savage encounters the civilized and gifts are exchanged. Professor France points to the centrality, but also the vulnerability, in classical culture, of the ideal of 'politeness', and his discussion embraces revolutionary eloquence and enlightened primitivism, the value of hyperbole, and the essay as a form of polite sociability

Member of

• Online access with purchase: Cambridge Books Online

Cataloging source

UkCbUP

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Series statement

Cambridge studies in French

Series volume

35