The Dream of An Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary Culture - Couverture souple

Wilkinson, Lynn R.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0791429261 ISBN 13 : 9780791429266

Editeur : State University of New York Press, 1996

Synopsis

Traces the reception of Swedenborg's doctrine of "correspondences" in French literature and culture from the late 1700s to 1870.

Taking as its point of departure the two poems, "Correspondances" by Baudelaire and "Les correspondances" by Alphonse-Louis Constant, The Dream of an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary Culture traces the reception and popularization of several key Swedenborgian doctrines in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature and popular culture, notably the doctrine of correspondences. Contrary to what Michel Foucault argued in his early Les mots et les choses, in nineteenth-century France, the word "correspondences" does not denote a break with "representation," at least as it was used by nineteenth-century French writers: rather it is intimately bound up with the taxonomic structures of natural history-and also with the desire to understand the social world in terms of an ordered and controllable totality. Because it crops up in texts we now classify as canonical and also those outside the canon, and because it is so clearly related to notions of literary structure and effect, the word "correspondences" and its transformations in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France offers a vantage point for discerning how artists and writers defined their work both within and against a context of cultures defined as elite, "popular," and even ideological.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Lynn R. Wilkinson is Assistant Professor of Scandinavian and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: State University of New York Press
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0791429261
• ISBN 13: 9780791429266
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 356
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible