Exploring the Conversible World Text and Sociability from the Classical Age to the Enlightenment. Yale French Studies Number 92

In a famous essay, David Hume located the Republic of Letters in the domain of the "conversible," that is, in the space of sociability, conversation, and the observation of common life. The present volume explores the discourse and the practice of sociability in preRevolutionary France from an interdisciplinary standpoint, at the intersection of cultural history, philosophy, and literary criticism. The essays cover issues as diverse as the interaction between the ethical domain of manners and the esthetic domain of literature in the ancien regime; the role of civility in the construction of national identity; sociability’s influence in the redefinition of genres and of gender; aristocratic selfrepresentation and the emancipation of the esthetic.

Contents

Elena Russo Editor’s Preface: Text and Sociability from the Classical Age to the Enlightenment

Alain Viala Les Signes Galantes: A Historical Reevaluation of Galanterie

Lawrence Klein The Figure of France: The Politics of Sociability in England, 16601715

Pierre Force SelfLove, Identification, and the Origin of Political Economy

Daniel Gordon The City and the Plague in the Age of Enlightenment

Anne Vila Beyond Sympathy: Vapors, Melancholia, and the Pathologies of Sensibility in Tissot and Rousseau

Françoise Jaouën Civility and the Novel: De Pure’s La Prétieuse ou le mystère des ruelles

Elena Russo The Self, Real and Imaginary: Social Sentiment in Marivaux and Hume

Suzanne Rodin Pucci The Spectator Surfaces: Tableau and Tabloid in Marivaux’s Spectateur français

MarieHélène Huet Social Entropy

Elizabeth MacArthur Between the Republic of Virtue and the Republic of Letters: MarieJeanne Roland Practices Rousseau