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Narrative, Catastrophe and Historicity in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Jessica Stacey is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Narrative, Catastrophe and Historicity in Eighteenth-Century French Literature about?

"How do communities tell and retell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival? This book contends that such stories are central to how communities claim a position within history. It explores this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in eighteenth-century France: a tumultuous period when a new understanding of a properly 'modern' national history was being elaborated. Who gets to belong to the modern era? And who or what is relegated to a gothic, barbarous or medieval past? Is an enlightened future assured, or is a return to a Dark Age inevitable? Following barbarians, bastards, usurpers, prophets and Revolutionary martyrs through stories of catastrophes real and imagined, the book traces how narrative temporalities become historicities: visions of the laws which govern the past, present and future. Ultimately it argues that the complex temporality of catastrophe offers a privileged insight into how a modern French historical consciousness was formed out of the multiple pasts and possible futures that coexisted alongside the age of Enlightenment. Further, examining the tension between a d

Author
Jessica Stacey
Publisher
Liverpool University Press on behalf of Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford
Published
2022
Language
EN
ISBN
9781800856004
Subjects
Romance, Humanities

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