French Literature Reviews - 2026
Styles of Enlightenment
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Book received, awaiting reviewer for an academic review in the journal Acta Fabula
Elena Russo
Styles of Enlightenment. Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France
Johns Hopkins University Press
Coll. Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society
2006
ISBN : 978-0-8018-8476-4
360 pp.
Description :
Styles of Enlightenment argues that alongside its democratic ideals and its efforts to create a unified public sphere, the Enlightenment also displayed a tendency to erect rigid barriers when it came to matters of style and artistic expression. The French philosophes tackled the issue of the hierarchy of genres with surprising inflexibility and they looked down on those forms of art that they saw as commercial, popular, and merely entertaining. They were convinced that the standard of taste was too important a matter to be left to the whims of the public and the vagaries of the marketplace: aesthetic judgment ought to belong to a few, enlightened minds who would then pass it on to the masses. Through readings of fictions, essays, memoirs, eulogies, and theatrical works by Fénelon, Bouhours, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Mercier, Thomas, and others, Styles of Enlightenment traces the stages of a confrontation between the virile philosophe and the effeminate worldly writer; "good" and "bad" taste; high art and frivolous entertainment; state patronage and the privately sponsored marketplace; the academic eulogy and worldly conversation. It teases out the finer points of division on the public battlefields of literature and politics and the new world of contesting sexual economies.
Reviews :
"One of those irresistible books which uncover significant and unmistakable but hitherto undetected patterns in well-known material. After reading Elena Russo, it is impossible not to see the French Enlightenment through her revealing prism."—David Bell, Johns Hopkins University
Elena Russo is a professor of 17th- and 18th-century French literature at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several books, including La Cour et la ville de la littérature classique aux Lumières and Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel.
This scholarly study examines the tensions within eighteenth-century French literature and philosophy concerning taste, artistic expression, and the formation of a public sphere. By engaging with works by figures such as Fénelon, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the volume investigates how intellectual elites sought to regulate cultural production. It traces oppositions between high art and popular entertainment, state patronage and the marketplace, and differing social ideals of authorship across genres including fiction, essays, memoirs, and theatrical pieces.
The broader intellectual landscape of eighteenth-century France was characterized by intense debates over the democratization of culture and the preservation of refined aesthetic standards. Literary production during this period frequently negotiated the shifting boundaries between public visibility and private sponsorship, as well as changing conceptions of authority and identity in letters. Readers interested in French literature and the intellectual history of the Enlightenment may find the volume relevant to these contexts.