"Linguistic" theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as "aesthetic" theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question "what is beauty?," but formulated, also, to respond to contemporary concerns. Edward Nye considers a wide range of authors from these two perspectives and draws the following conclusions: etymology is a theory of poetry, dictionaries of synonymy, prosody and metaphor are theories of preciosity, and Sensualism is a theory of artistic representation.

Reading 1759 investigates the literary culture of a remarkable year in British and French history, writing, and ideas. Familiar to many as the British “year of victories” during the Seven Years’ War, 1759 was also an important year in the histories of fiction, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Reading 1759 is the first book to examine together the range of works written and published during this crucial year. Offering broad coverage of the year’s work in writing, these essays examine key works by Johnson, Voltaire, Sterne, Adam Smith, Edward Young, Sarah Fielding, and Christopher Smart, along with such group projects as the Encyclopédie and the literary review journals of the mid-eighteenth century. Organized around a cluster of key topics, the volume reflects the concerns most important to writers themselves in 1759. This was a year of the new and the modern, as writers addressed current issues of empire and ethical conduct, forged new forms of creative expression, and grappled with the nature of originality itself. Texts written and published in 1759 confronted the history of Western colonialism, the problem of prostitution in a civilized society, and the limitations of linguistic expression. Philosophical issues were also important in 1759, not least the thorny question of causation; while, in France, state censorship challenged the Encyclopédie, the central Enlightenment project. Taking into its purview such texts and intellectual developments, Reading 1759 puts the literary culture of this singular, and singularly important, year on the scholarly map. In the process, the volume also provides a self-reflective contribution to the growing body of “annualized” studies that focus on the literary output of specific years.

Zhivov's magisterial work tells the story of the creation of a new vernacularliterary language in modern Russia, an achievement arguably on a par with thenation's extraordinary military successes, territorial expansion, developmentof the arts, and formation of a modern empire.

From the 1750s to the 1830s, numerous British intellectuals, novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, translators, educationalists, politicians, businessmen, travel writers, and philosophers brooded about the merits and demerits of the French language. The decades under consideration encompass a particularly tumultuous period in Anglo-French relations that witnessed the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1802 and 1803-1815, respectively), the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830), and the July Revolution (1830) - not to mention the gradual expansion of the British Empire, and the complex cultural shifts that led from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. In this book, Marcus Tomalin reassesses the ways in which writers such as Tobias Smollett, Maria Edgeworth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Cobbett, and William Hazlitt acquired and deployed French. This intricate topic is examined from a range of critical perspectives, which draw upon recent research into European Romanticism, linguistic historiography, comparative literature, social and cultural history, education theory, and translation studies. This interdisciplinary approach helps to illuminate the deep ambivalences that characterised British appraisals of the French language in the literature of the Romantic period.

The apparent self-sufficiency of joie de vivre means that, despite the widespread use of the phrase since the late nineteenth century, the concept has rarely been explored critically. Joie de vivre does not readily surrender itself to examination, for it is in a sense too busy being what it is. However, as the essays in this collection reveal, joie de vivre can be as complex and variable a state as the more negative emotions or experiences that art and literature habitually evoke. This volume provides an urgently needed study of an intriguing and under-explored area of French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. While the range and content of contributions embraces linguistics, literature, art, sport and politics, the starting point is, like that of the term joie de vivre itself, in French language and culture. This volume will be of special interest to researchers across the full range of French studies, from literature and language to cultural studies. It will be of direct appeal to specialist readers, university libraries, graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers with a lively interest in French literature and culture of the medieval, early modern and broad modern periods. This book's fresh perspectives on the theme of joie de vivre and its relation to questions of privacy, contemplation, voyeurism, feasting and nationhood will also be of relevance to researchers in comparative and cognate disciplines.