French Literature Reviews - 2026

St. Loubère, Leçons d'amour des Lumières
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics

Stéphanie Loubère, Leçons d'amour des Lumières

Paris : Éditions Classiques Garnier, coll. "L'Europe des Lumières", 2011.

EAN 9782812402951

379p.

Price 39EUR

Publisher's overview :

The followers of Ovid and his Art of Love were numerous during the Age of Enlightenment. They invented new forms to deliver lessons on love adapted to their era, establishing, with varying degrees of seriousness, a science of love. The temptation to reduce the stirrings of the heart or the flesh to a system thus reflects the Enlightenment man's desire for knowledge and will to masterhood. Often parodic and readily cynical, these lessons on love shed light on the boundless resources of erotic invention in an era that made love its ultimate pursuit.

During the eighteenth century, European letters frequently returned to the classical inheritance of Ovid, adapting the didactic tradition of the ars amatoria to the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment. Writers of the period often engaged with the project of codifying human passion, reflecting a broader cultural impulse to subject every sphere of experience to rational analysis and systematic ordering. This literary current intersected with contemporary debates on morality, sentiment, and sociability, capturing the tension between libertine impulses and the era's pursuit of comprehensive knowledge.

Readers interested in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and erotic discourse during the eighteenth century may find this study relevant.