The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Penguin History) - Softcover

Robert Darnton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014013719X ISBN 13: 9780140137194

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1992

Synopsis

When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730's held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the 18th century version of "Little Red Riding Hood" did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions Robert Darnton attempts to answer in this dazzling series of essays that probe the ways of thought in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment."

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Striking, original and often very clever."-- Time

"Brilliant." -- The Washington Post Book World

"An exercise in culture shock." -- Chronicle of Higher Education

"Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar and the sensitivity of a novelist." -- Stanley Hoffman, The New Republic

About the Author:

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library. A MacArthur Fellow, he is the author of the National Book Critics Circle award-winning The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 014013719X
• ISBN 13: 9780140137194
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1