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Beschreibung

A moving, intimate portrait of the Enlightenment philosophers as they faced the end of their lives and their historical moment

"Original and beautifully written."-Ruth Scurr, Wall Street Journal

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors' lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors' own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stems from their authors' efforts to give literary form to the materiality and fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works.

Stalnaker's book unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

A moving, intimate portrait of the Enlightenment philosophers as they faced the end of their lives and their historical moment

"Original and beautifully written."-Ruth Scurr, Wall Street Journal

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors' lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors' own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stems from their authors' efforts to give literary form to the materiality and fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works.

Stalnaker's book unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

Über den Autor
Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City.
Details
Erscheinungsjahr: 2026
Genre: Allgemeine Lexika, Importe
Rubrik: Literaturwissenschaft
Medium: Buch
Inhalt: Einband - fest (Hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9780300181340
ISBN-10: 0300181345
Sprache: Englisch
Einband: Gebunden
Autor: Stalnaker, Joanna
Hersteller: Yale University Press
Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, D-36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr@libri.de
Maße: 223 x 144 x 29 mm
Von/Mit: Joanna Stalnaker
Erscheinungsdatum: 06.01.2026
Gewicht: 0,434 kg
Artikel-ID: 134136276

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