Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France
Title | Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France PDF eBook |
Author | John D. Lyons |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 254 |
Release | 2016-04-08 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317168690 |
In the Renaissance and early modern periods, there were lively controversies over why things happen. Central to these debates was the troubling idea that things could simply happen by chance. In France, a major terrain of this intellectual debate, the chance hypothesis engaged writers coming from many different horizons: the ancient philosophies of Epicurus, the Stoa, and Aristotle, the renewed reading of the Bible in the wake of the Reformation, a fresh emphasis on direct, empirical observation of nature and society, the revival of dramatic tragedy with its paradoxical theme of the misfortunes that befall relatively good people, and growing introspective awareness of the somewhat arbitrary quality of consciousness itself. This volume is the first in English to offer a broad cultural and literary view of the field of chance in this period. The essays, by a distinguished team of scholars from the U.S., Britain, and France, cluster around four problems: Providence in Question, Aesthetics and Poetics of Chance, Law and Ethics, and Chance and its Remedies. Convincing and authoritative, this collection articulates a new and rich perspective on the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.
Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France
Title | Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France PDF eBook |
Author | John D. Lyons |
Publisher | |
Pages | 223 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Chance in literature |
ISBN | 9781315571218 |
Phantom of Chance
Title | Phantom of Chance PDF eBook |
Author | John D Lyons |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
Pages | 240 |
Release | 2011-11-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0748645160 |
How the classical and medieval conceptions of Fortune shifted to the modern notion of chanceIs chance nothing more than a projection of human desire on to the world? In this fascinating new study, John Lyons argues that the idea of chance assumed new vigour in the late Renaissance, when converging philosophical and literary currents demystified the powerful concept of Fortune, sensitizing writers to the relationship between human desire and the world's apparent randomness. Up to now, the story of chance has been written by historians of mathematical thought and has focused on calculation, probability and gambling. Lyons, by contrast, highlights the ethical, aesthetic and even erotic aspects of chance. He offers detailed readings of the works of major French authors - Montaigne, Corneille, Lafayette, Scudery, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, and La Bruyere.
The Phantom of Chance
Title | The Phantom of Chance PDF eBook |
Author | John D. Lyons |
Publisher | Edinburgh Critical Studies in |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2012 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780748645152 |
Provides a new account of the crucial shift from the classical and medieval conception of Fortune to the modern notion of chance or randomness.
Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures
Title | Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures PDF eBook |
Author | David Warren Sabean |
Publisher | University of Toronto Press |
Pages | 369 |
Release | 2012-01-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1442643943 |
The notion of 'selfhood' conjures up images of self-sufficiency, integrity, introspectiveness, and autonomy characteristics typically associated with 'modernity.' The seventeenth century marks the crucial transition to a new form of 'bourgeois' selfhood, although the concept goes back to the pre-modern and early modern period. A richly interdisciplinary collection, Space and Self integrates perspectives from history, history of literature, and history of art to link the issue of selfhood to the new and vital literature on space. As Space and Self shows, there have at all times been multiple paths and alternative possibilities for forming identities, marking personhood, and experiencing life as a concrete, singular individual. Positioning self and space as specific and evolving constructs, a diverse group of contributors explore how persons become embodied in particular places or inscribed in concrete space. Space and Self thus sets the terms for current discussion of these topics and provides new approaches to studying their cultural specificity.
Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Title | Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Dr Bernadette Höfer |
Publisher | Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. |
Pages | 266 |
Release | 2013-04-28 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1409475425 |
Bernadette Höfer's innovative and ambitious monograph argues that the epistemology of the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and its insistence on the primacy of analytic thought over bodily function, has surprisingly little purchase in texts by prominent classical writers. In this study Höfer explores how Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine represent interconnections of body and mind that influence behaviour, both voluntary and involuntary, and that thus disprove the classical notion of the mind as distinct from and superior to the body. The author's interdisciplinary perspective utilizes early modern medical and philosophical treatises, as well as contemporary medical compilations in the disciplines of psychosomatic medicine, neurobiology, and psychoanalysis, to demonstrate that these seventeenth-century French writers established a view of human existence that fully anticipates current thought regarding psychosomatic illness.
Early Modern Privacy
Title | Early Modern Privacy PDF eBook |
Author | Michaël Green |
Publisher | BRILL |
Pages | 464 |
Release | 2021-12-13 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9004153071 |
An examination of instances, experiences, and spaces of early modern privacy. It opens new avenues to understanding the structures and dynamics that shape early modern societies through examination of a wide array of sources, discourses, practices, and spatial programmes.