Collins Memorial Library: FREN 420: Classicism and Enlightenment: Books

What about books?

Scholarly books can also be excellent sources for establishing historical and cultural background or placing your topic in context with related issues. A scholarly monograph:

Is a one-volume work
Gives in-depth treatment to a specialized subject
Is written by a scholar in the field
Is written mainly for an academic audience

Broad Focus Titles

A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France by William Beik
Call Number: DC33.3 .B45 2009 Print Books
ISBN: 9780521883092
Publication Date: 2009
William Beik conveys the distinctiveness of early modern society and identifies the cultural practices that defined the lives of people at all levels of society.
Old Regime France, 1648-1788 by William Doyle (Editor)
Call Number: DC125 .O53 2001 Print Books
ISBN: 9780198731290
Publication Date: 2001
Portrays and analyses the life of France between two revolutions, a time later known as the old regime. All aspects of French life are covered: the economy, social development, religion and culture, French activity overseas, and not least politics and public life, where our understanding has been completely renewed over recent years.
Vaux and Versailles: the appropriations, erasures, and accidents that made modern France by Claire Goldstein
Call Number: DC801.V57 G65 2008 Print Books
ISBN: 9780812240580
Publication Date: 2007
Goldstein retraces the unacknowledged roots of Versailles and destabilizes the understanding of the court of the Sun King as the origin of French national style.
The Republic of Letters: a cultural history of the French enlightenment by Dena Goodman
Call Number: PQ618 .G66 1994 Print Books
ISBN: 9780801429682
Publication Date: 1994
Goodman details the history of the Republic of Letters in the Parisian salons, where men and women, philosophes and salonnieres, together not only introduced reciprocity into intellectual life through the practices of letter writing and polite conversation but also developed a republican model of government that was to challenge the monarchy.

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Library of Congress Subject Headings

Collins Library uses Library of Congress Subject Headings to describe the content of books. In many ways, subject headings are a form of tagging, in that they represent the content of the material and provide ways for you to efficiently locate more materials that are conceptually related.

Broad focus (examples):

France -- Civilization -- 17th century

France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799

Enlightenment -- France

France -- Intellectual life -- 18th century

Paris (France) -- Social life and customs -- 18th century

Middle class -- France -- History

Specific focus (examples):

Costume -- France -- Histoire

Clothing trade -- France -- History

Fashion -- France -- History -- 17th century

Textile design -- France -- History -- 18th century -- Catalogs

Subject-Specific Titles

How Paris Became Paris: the invention of the modern city by Joan DeJean
Call Number: DC729 .D39 2015 Print Books
ISBN: 9781608195916
Publication Date: 2015
French literary and cultural scholar DeJean details the planning behind the Pont Neuf, the Louvre, and other iconic sights as she offers a historical perspective on the forces that created Paris and led the way to a new conception of urban living.
The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789 by Roland E. Mousnier; Brian Pearce (Translator)
Call Number: HN425 .M6813 v. 1-2 Print Books
ISBN: 9780226543277
Publication Date: 1979
In the first volume of this history, Mousnier analyzes political and administrative institutions in light of the prevailing social, economic, and ideological structures and shows how they shaped life in 17th- and 18th-century France.
Postal Culture in Europe, 1500-1800 by Jay Caplan
Call Number: HE6925 .C36 2016 Print Books
ISBN: 9780729411752
Publication Date: 2016
Exploration of the nature and history of the European post in the early modern period (roughly 1500-1800), its everyday reality and its culture.
Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610-1715 by John A. Lynn
Call Number: UA702 .L9523 1997 Print Books
ISBN: 9780521572736
Publication Date: 1997
Combining social and cultural emphases with more traditional institutional and operational concerns, this book examines the army in depth, studying recruitment, composition, discipline, motivation, selection of officers, leadership, administration, logistics, weaponry, tactics, field warfare and siegecraft.
The Unfinished Enlightenment: description in the age of the encyclopedia by Joanna Stalnaker
Call Number: PQ265 .S72 2010 Print Books
ISBN: 9780801448645
Publication Date: 2010
Offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors.
Literary Sociability and Literary Property in France, 1775-1793: Beaumarchais, the Société des auteurs dramatiques and the Comédie Française by Gregory S. Brown
Call Number: PQ22.S515 B76 2006 Print Books
ISBN: 9780754603863
Publication Date: 2006
The first full-length, scholarly study of the Société des auteurs dramatiques (SAD), this book describes the form, the meaning, the achievements, and the failures of the first professional association for creative writers in European history.
The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV & the politics of spectacle by Georgia J. Cowart
Call Number: ML3917.F5 C69 2008 Print Books
ISBN: 9780226116389
Publication Date: 2008
With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia J. Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority.
Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France by Leonard N. Rosenband
Call Number: Click on the title above for online access
ISBN: 0801863929
Publication Date: 2000
Offers a comprehensive exploration of the historical experience of papermaking, including methods and techniques, tools, raw materials, the seasonable flows of the craft, and the technological changes that affected the papermaking industry.
The World of the Salons: sociability and worldliness in eighteenth-century Paris by Antoine Lilti
Call Number: DC33.4 .L5513 2015 Print Books
ISBN: 9780199772346
Publication Date: 2015
Based on a thorough study of archival sources and using methodology derived from cultural history, social history, and the history of literature, this book proposes a completely new reading of salons' sociability in eighteenth-century Paris.
Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution by Rebecca L. Spang
Call Number: HG978 .S65 2015 Print Books
ISBN: 9780674047037
Publication Date: 2015
This book writes a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats--a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as circulating land--to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument.
Eating the Enlightenment: food and the sciences in Paris by E. C. Spary
Call Number: GT2853.F8 S737 2012 Print Books
ISBN: 9780226768861
Publication Date: 2012
Offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France.
Cultivated Power: flowers, culture, and politics in the reign of Louis XIV by Elizabeth Hyde
Call Number: Request from SUMMIT
ISBN: 9780812238266
Publication Date: 2005
Cultivated Power explores the collection, cultivation, and display of flowers in early modern France at the historical moment when flowering plants, many of which were becoming known in Europe for the first time, piqued the curiosity of European gardeners and botanists, merchants and ministers, dukes and kings.
The Essence of Style by Joan DeJean
Call Number: DC128 .D454 2006 Print Books
ISBN: 9780743264136
Publication Date: 2005
One of the foremost authorities on seventeenth-century French culture provides an account of how, at one glittering moment in history, the French under Louis XIV set the standards of sophistication, style, and glamour that still rule our lives today.
Sexing la Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France by Jennifer M. Jones
Call Number: Request from SUMMIT
ISBN: 9781859738306
Publication Date: 2004
In eighteenth-century France, a commercial culture filled with shop girls, fashion magazines and window displays began to supplant a courtly fashion culture based on rank and distinction, stimulating debates over the proper relationships between women and commercial culture and between morality and taste.
Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, desires, and delectable goods by Maxine Berg (Editor); Elizabeth Eger (Editor)
Call Number: Request from SUMMIT
ISBN: 9780333963821
Publication Date: 2003
This volume explores the political, economic, moral, and intellectual effects of the production and consumption of luxury goods in the 18th century.
The French Enlightenment and Its Others by David Allen Harvey
Call Number: B1925.E5 H37 2012 Print Books
ISBN: 9781137002532
Publication Date: 2012
This book explores the French Enlightenment's use of cross-cultural comparisons, particularly the figures of the Chinese mandarin and American and Polynesian savage- to praise of critique aspects of European society and to draw general conclusions regarding human nature, natural law, and the rise and decline of civilizations.
Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal by Faith E. Beasley
Call Number: PQ245 .B39 2018 Print Books
ISBN: 9781487502843
Publication Date: 2018
Explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France's "Great Century" and the early Enlightenment.
Trading Places: colonization and slavery in eighteenth-century French culture by Madeleine Dobie
Call Number: PQ265 .D63 2010 Print Books
ISBN: 9780801449024
Publication Date: 2010
Explores the place of the colonial world in the culture of the French Enlightenment. Innovative and interdisciplinary, this book combines literary and historical analysis with new research into political economy and material culture.