Yale French Studies, Number 92: Exploring the Conversible World: Text and Sociability from the Classical Age to the Enlightenment, Vol. 92

In a famous essay, David Hume located the Republic of Letters in the domain of the conversible, that is, in the space of sociability, conversation, and the observation of common life. The present volume explores the discourse and the practice of sociability in pre-Revolutionary France from an interdisciplinary standpoint, at the intersection of cultural history, philosophy, and literary criticism. The essays cover issues as diverse as the interaction between the ethical domain of manners and the esthetic domain of literature in the ancien regime; the role of civility in the construction of national identity; sociability's influence in the redefinition of genres and of gender; aristocratic self-representation and the emancipation of the esthetic.