Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France

This book analyzes the work of several literary critics, particularly 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 in the case of the literary sublime, might offer us the deepest kind of knowledge. They hoped that literature could show us truths that transcend our world and would be analogous or even equal to the truths of divine revelation. The book s central argument is 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 first placing these ideas about literature in the context of the religious and philosophical thinking of Blaise Pascal, each chapter traces the evolution of a debate about literature s reach in the writings of Dominique Bouhours, Nicolas Boileau, Rene Rapin, John Dennis, and the abbe Dubos. These thinkers turned towards theories of sentiment and the passions as the epistemological means of identifying and knowing the transcendental aspects of a literary work. Ultimately, their quest for the transcendental value of literature led these critics towards literary theories that begin to resemble what we would now identify as aesthetics. By tracing the historical evolution of this idea, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France: From Poetics to Aesthetics demonstrates that, even though the idea of literature offering us transcendental knowledge fades, the idea of sentiment as our means for knowing the literary work persists and thrives.