Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France: From Poetics to Aesthetics (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850)

Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France analyzes the work of several literary critics in France and England, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, who were inspired by the idea that literature – especially the literary sublime – might offer us the deepest kind of knowledge. Dominique Bouhours, Nicolas Boileau, René Rapin, John Dennis, and the abbé Dubos believed that literature could deliver truths that transcend our world and were analogous or even equal to the truths of divine revelation. Ann Delehanty argues that this shift towards the transcendental realm pushed the definition of the literary work away from describing its objective properties and towards its effects on the mind of the reader. After placing these ideas about literature in the context of the religious and philosophical thinking of Blaise Pascal, Delehanty traces the evolution of a debate about literature in the writings of the critics in question. They embraced theories of sentiment and the passions as the epistemological means of identifying and knowing the transcendental aspects of a literary work that eventually came to be known as aesthetics. By tracing the historical evolution of the relationship between transcendentalism and aesthetics in French and English neoclassical thought, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France provides new and engaging insights into an important moment in our literary history. This book, spanning the years 1650-1730 in France and England, looks primarily at the history of literary criticism during that period in order to show how the rising interest in the sublime pushes literary critics to entirely alter their approach to theorizing works of literature. It provides a new approach to understanding how eighteenth-century aesthetic theories are indebted to seventeenth-century religious, philosophical, and literary ideas. Introduction: Mimesis and transcendence The heart's knowledge in Pascal Divine and human creation in Bouhours Boileau and the sublime From transcendence to virtue in Rapin Dennis's theory of mind Dubos and the faculty of sentiment.