Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, coll. "Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment", 2022.
EAN: 9781800856004
384 pages
Prix : £65.00
Date de publication : 03 Mars 2022
How do communities tell and re-tell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival? This book explores this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in eighteenth-century France: a tumultuous period when a “modern” national history was being elaborated.
- Brings contemporary work on the catastrophic imaginary into dialogue with philosophies of historical time and the study of eighteenth-century medievalism, offering a fresh perspective on how and why communities retell past catastrophes, and imagine future ones.
- Drawing on a wide variety of literary, historical and philosophical sources from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the book illuminates the pre- and remediation of catastrophes by showing how the same stories and motifs were reworked by writers over the course of the eighteenth-century.
- This book shows how French eighteenth-century writers viewed their own history as a haunting past, instantiated in the dangerous but also attractive figures which menace to crowd out the present, and return it to a catastrophic Dark Age: barbarians, usurpers, lost heirs, prophets, ghosts and martyrs.
***
“We, too, have seen our connections and analogies come loose; a sense of the pandemic as a repetition of something from the past has ceded as the many threads of distinct future problems become clearer, just as the early ‘we’re all in this together’ narratives have unravelled. The book is a work of critique, seeking in part to expose embarrassments, narratives that go nowhere, attempts to recast contemporaries as anachronisms.”
(Read the author’s accompanying blog post)
More info here.
