Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Excess and Unreason: 1. Hyperbole; 2. Ogres; 3. Myth and modernity: Racine's Phèdre; Part II. Enlightened Sociability: 4. Polish, police, polis; 5. The sociable essayist: Addison and Marivaux; 6. The commerce of the self; 7. The writer as performer; 8. Beyond politeness? Speakers and audience at the Convention Nationale; Part III. Confronting the Other: 9. Translating the British; 10. Jacques or his master? Diderot and the peasants; 11. Enlightened primitivism; 12. Frontiers of civilization; Notes; Index.

Promotional Information

A 1992 study of the place and nature of the ideal of politeness in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing in France, Britain and Russia.

Reviews

"These well-crafted essays are particularly valuable for their breadth of scholarship and for the attention paid to minor writers or less well-known works of major figures...Politeness and Its Discontents is a valuable...contribution to the debate over the meaning and legacy of the Enlightenment." Julie C. Hayes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction