Forum emulation in France, 1750-1800

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 217-223

  Iverson, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 39049145303     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2003.0003     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. See also the description in [Mathieu François Pidanzat de Mairobert], L'Espion anglais, ou Correspondance secrete entre Milord All'eye et Milord All'ear (London: John Adamson, 1783-5), 6:188-95
2. Louis de Jaucourt, "Émulation," in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers par une Société de gens de lettres, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, (Paris: Briasson et al., 1751-72), 5:601-2
3. Gabriel Girard, Synonymes français, leurs différentes significations, et le choix qu'il en faut faire pour parler avec justesse, ed. Nicolas Beauzée (Paris: Testu, an VI), 2:71-3
4. This essay by a certain Desclaisons was reviewed by Éhe Fréron in the Année littéraire (1759) 5:63-7. It does not appear to have been published, though Desclaisons did later author Précis des histoires d'Alexandre-le-Grand et de Jules César, et de leurs faits militaires (Paris: Méquignon le jeune, 1784)
5. For an overview of the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL), see Robert Morrissey, "Texts and Contexts: The ARTFL Database in French Studies," Profession 93 (1993): 27-33
6. For a discussion of the capabitilites (and limitations) of electronic databases generally, see Mark Olsen, "Signs, Symbols, and Discourses: A New Direction for Computer-Aided Literature Studies," Computers and the Humanities 27, no. 5-6 (October - Novernber 1993): 309-14
7. For a rigorous demonstration of these capabilities, see Mark Olsen, "Gender Representation and Histoire des mentalités: Language and Power in the Trésor de la langue française," Histoire et mesure 6, no. 3-4 (1991): 349-73
8. "Discours sur l'émulation," Mercure de France (November 1746): 58-63
9. Jean Marie Saint-Jean, Discours sur l'émulation (Toulouse, n.d.). I am grateful to the staff at the Department of Rare Books at the Princeton University Library for procuring for me a photocopy of the latter work. Although the text is undated, internal factors - the dates of other discourses by Saint-Jean as well as the language of the discourse itself - seem to point to the Revolutionary period
10. Staël, De l'Allemagne (1810)
11. Terrasson, Sethos (1731)
12. Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1733)
13. Sainte-Beuve, Histoire du Port-Royal (1848)
14. Staël, Corinne ou l'Italie (1807)
15. and Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (1771). More broadly, twenty-five of the top thirty works were first published during the period 1700-1824
16. Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, revu, corrigé et augmenté par l'Académie ellemême . . .5th ed. (Paris: J. J. Smits et Ce, an VII), 1:483
17. For analysis of Boileau's role (as translator of Longinus) in the spread of literary emulation in England and France, see Howard Weinbrot, "'An Ambition to Excell': The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Huntington Library Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 121-39
18. "... I do not believe I have totally lacked genius. When I have seen what so many great men in France, England, and Germany have written before me, I have been filled with wonder, but I have not lost courage. 'And I too am a painter,' have I said with Correggio" (Charles Secondât, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989], xlv)
19. "7 Septembre [1787]," Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la République des lettres en France, depuis M.DCC.LXII jusqu'à nos jours. . . (London: John Adamson, 1780-9) 35:450
20. See Bronislaw Baczko, Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Social Progress, trans. Judith L. Greenberg (New York: Paragon House, 1989)