Cultural Transmission and the French Enlightenment : Repurposing the Past

Many French Enlightenment thinkers sculpted their identity and projected their ideas into the future via reflection on the past, despite their rhetoric of rupture and rejection of tradition. Emphasizing the entangled nature of eighteenth-century thought and its reception, Cultural transmission and the French Enlightenment: repurposing the past asks where the past ends and its interpretation begins, illuminating the myriad material forms of knowledge and their circulation across geographical space and time. The contributing authors uncover and interrogate the cultural assumptions of both the French Enlightenment and its afterlife. Each essay examines this process of cultural transmission and the ramifications today of the continued sourcing of ideas generated during the Enlightenment. Bringing together perspectives ranging from literary studies, to history of science and theater studies, the authors of this volume interpret the Enlightenment through its continuity rather than as a set of fixed, universal values. Instead of accepting or contesting Western society and politics as the apogee of progress, and seeking an intellectual past by which to define the present, such approaches situate the Enlightenment in a longer chain of invention, repurposing, and reception.

Hanna Roman is an Assistant Professor of French at Dickinson College. Her first book, The Language of Nature in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment/LUP, October 2018) examined the relationship between language and the natural sciences during the French Enlightenment. Her current research focuses on the influences of religious and mythological discourses on the scientific disciplines of geology, geography, and natural history in the French Enlightenment, and she is working on a second book project on the history of the ocean in the eighteenth century.