Books about Prerevolutionary from Amazon.com

More popular than the canon of the great Enlightenment philosophers were other books, also banned by the regime, written and sold "under the cloak." These formed a libertine literature that was a crucial part of the culture of dissent in the Old Regime. Robert Darnton explores the cultural and political significance of these "bad" books and introduces readers to three of the most influential illegal best-sellers, from which he includes substantial excerpts. Winner of the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism..
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A classic of modern aesthetics that remains both influential and engaging, by the politician many consider the father of modern conservatism.

From the awesome thrill of the sublime to the delightful perfection of the beautiful, Edmund Burke gives an involving account of our sensory, imaginative, and judgmental process and its relation to artistic pleasure--it is a text that influenced the writers of the Romantic period. This edition also features several of Burke's early political works, which illustrate that, despite his later opposition to the Revolution in France, he took a liberal and humane view of society and government. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful includes Burke's political parody, "A Vindication of Natural Society," and his essays on the American colony--"Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents," "Speech on American Taxation," "Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies," and "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America." This authoritative edition has securely established texts, and in his illuminating Introduction, David Womersley clearly reveals the cross-pollination of Burke's aesthetic and political thinking: the power exercised by art and the art of exercising power..
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From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution..
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During the final decades of the ancien régime, prominent collectors in Paris commissioned and collected French paintings of the period, works by Greuze, Fragonard, David, and others that together comprised "l'École Française" -- the French School. In this book, an eminent art historian discusses six of these collectors and the collections they assembled, showing that private patronage in this period was revitalized by this patriotic desire to collect contemporary art.

Colin B. Bailey explains why a taste for modern art emerged at this time and how it was encouraged and fostered. Examining the relationship between artist and patron, he discusses the degree of influence these enlightened patrons and collectors expected to exercise when new works were being commissioned. Bailey shows that collectors of eighteenth-century French painting seem not to have made rigid distinctions between the various genres or styles of the Academy's practitioners. Instead, history paintings and genre paintings-both rococo and neo-classical-were exhibited proudly on their walls as superb examples of the French School..
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A comprehensive history of the North Carolina Regulator Rebellion of 1766-1771, which was an important precursor to the Revolutionary era. Kars evaluates the rebellion's economic, religious, and political causes; its major events; and its legacy in North Carolina and beyond..
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The present volume covers 30 Pre-Revolutionary French women, providing a representative sampling of their manifold and varied contributions to intellectual and cultural history. This volume is unique in its grouping of essentially French writers from the Pre-Revolutionary period. The authors included here range from those prominent because of their social position or literary fame, to those slowly becoming part of a new canon of Old Regime women writers - authors whose works were known to their contemporaries but who have slipped into near invisibility in the following centuries until their recent rediscovery and reassessment..
Price: $139.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]