Description
Book SynopsisThe emergence of literature in eighteenth-century France changes our understanding of when, how and why modern ideas of literature emerged in France. Using a unique blend of literary and digital methods, it argues that it was in the mid eighteenth century, rather than the nineteenth (as many have claimed), that the word ‘littérature’ first came to refer to a canon of classics, an aesthetically pleasing text, and a subject that could be studied in schools. These ideas, the book shows, were propelled by a forgotten quarrel about how to reform literary teaching in the Ancien Régime boys’ collèges.
Stretching back to the sixteenth century and forward to the nineteenth, the book explores the pre-histories of the modern ideas of ‘littérature’ that were propelled by this debate, as well as their afterlives in works by La Harpe and Staël, and in teaching practices in the Imperial lycées. One of the first studies to use social network analysis to map an early modern debate, the book shows that Rousseau was not straightforwardly ‘the’ central actor in eig teenth-century debates about education. And it draws on new archival research to reveal that the Ecole royale militaire (founded by Louis XV in 1751) was one of the first institutions to teach something called ‘la littérature française’.
Ultimately, by intertwining the histories of education, quarrels and intellectual networks, this book tells a new story about how France became the famously literary nation it is today.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
List of figures
List of abbreviations
Introduction: A Tale of Two Histories
A Quarrel
Littérature
Methodologies
Outline
1. Querelles littéraires: Disputes about Literature and Learning in Early Modern France
Bonæ literæ
Inside and Outside the Collèges
Belles-lettres
Legitimising French
Literary Manuals
Collège Critics
2. The Perfect Storm. Prequels and Pré-querelles to the Querelle des Collèges
‘Collège’ and ‘École militaire’
Jesuits
Rousseau and the collèges
Emile’s First Books
Littérature for Emile
Lost (and Found) in Battle
3. The Querelle on the Page: Part One
Setting the Agenda
Teacher Training
Latin vs. French
A Paradoxical Querelleur
Five Minutes’ Peace
Resurrecting d’Alembert
4. The Querelle on the Page: Part Two
Fringe Benefits
Revisiting Rousseau
An Ancient vs. Moderns
Enemies and Allies
An End in Sight?
5. A Literary Offensive
Early Years
Literary Incursions
A New School
Revolution
Quarrels in the Library
Batteux’s littérature
Great Literature, Great Men
6. The Emergence of Littérature
Littérature and the Collèges: Past, Present, Future
The Querelle in the Lycée
Normalising littérature
Reactions to De la littérature
Back to belles-lettres
The Re-emergence of littérature
Conclusion
Corpus of the Querelle des collèges
Alphabetical List of Actors in the Querelle des collèges
Appendices
Constituting the Corpus, Database, and Network Visualisations
Graphs based on Google Books’s NGram Data
Contents of Xaupi’s Volume (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
‘Catalogue des Livres de la Bibliothèque de l’hotel de l’École royale militaire, du 1er décembre 1765 au 1er mars 1776 – Poètes français’
‘Catalogue des livres de lecture à l’usage de Mrs. les élèves, qui se sont trouvé exister au dépôt de la bibliothèque le 10 mars 1776’
Bibliography
