Gemma Tidman, The emergence of literature in eighteenth-century France. The battle of the school books

New from Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment :

The emergence of literature in eighteenth-century France: The battle of the school books

By Gemma Tidman

 This book changes our understanding of when, how, and why modern ideas of literature emerged in France. Using an innovative blend of literary and digital methods, and drawing on original archival research, it shows that ‘littérature’ was no nineteenth-century invention, but rather the product of an overlooked eighteenth-century quarrel about literary teaching and national identity.

Draws on original archival research into teaching at the École royale militaire, to show how the institution was among the first to teach something called ‘la littérature française’.

The first study to use Social Network Analysis to visualise and analyse an early modern intellectual debate.
 
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Table of Contents :

Acknowledgements
List of figures
List of abbreviations

Introduction: A Tale of Two Histories
Chapter 1: Querelles littéraires: Disputes about Literature and Learning in Early Modern France
Chapter 2: The Perfect Storm. Prequels and Pré-querelles to the Querelle des Collèges
Chapter 3: The Querelle on the Page: Part One
Chapter 4: The Querelle on the Page: Part Two
Chapter 5: A Literary Offensive
Chapter 6: The Emergence of Littérature
Conclusion

Corpus of the Querelle des collèges
Alphabetical List of Actors in the Querelle des collèges
Appendices
Bibliography
Index

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Gemma Tidman is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on early modern (particularly eighteenth-century) French literature and cultural history, and she has work published in French Studies, Romanic Review, and with the Voltaire Foundation.

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The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.