Peripheries of the Enlightenment

Peripheries of the Enlightenment

Edited by Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa

SVEC 2008:01

ISBN 978 0 7294 0926 1, ix+ 340pp, £60 / €92 hors taxe 

‘Enlightenment' is a universal concept, but its meaning is most clearly revealed by seeing how it was engaged with, reconfigured or rejected, on a local level. Peripheries of the Enlightenment seeks to rethink the ‘centre/periphery' model, and to consider the Enlightenment as a more widely spread movement with national, regional and local varieties, focusing on activity as much as ideas.

Contributors approach the ‘peripheries' of the Enlightenment from a historical and literary-historical perspective and discuss its ideas, its applications, its critics and the word ‘Enlightenment' itself. The idea of a ‘periphery' is similarly examined for national, provincial and urban contexts ranging from Mexico to Russia, and from Voltaire's peripheral perch at Ferney to the provincial pulpits of outspoken critics of the ‘enlightened age'.

Richard Butterwick, Peripheries of the Enlightenment: an introduction

Simon Davies, Whither/wither France: Voltaire's view from Ferney

Graham Gargett, French periphery, European centre: eighteenth-century Geneva and its contribution to the Enlightenment

Michael Brown, Was there an Irish Enlightenment? The case of the Anglicans

John Robertson, Political economy and the ‘feudal system' in Enlightenment Naples: outline of a problem

Marie-Christine Skuncke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Swedish eyes around 1760 Orsolya Szakály, Enlightened self-interest: the development of an entrepreneurial culture within the Hungarian elite

Martin Fitzpatrick, The view from Mount Pleasant: Enlightenment in late-eighteenth-century Liverpool

Simon Burrows, Grub Street revolutionaries: marginal writers at the Enlightenment's periphery?

Ultán Gillen, Varieties of Enlightenment: the Enlightenment and Irish political culture in the age of revolutions

Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, An ilustrado in his province: Jovellanos in Asturias Richard Butterwick, Between Anti-Enlightenment and enlightened Catholicism: provincial preachers in late-eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania Simon Dixon, ‘Prosveshchenie': Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Russia

Fiona Clark, The Gazeta de Literatura de México and the edge of reason: when is a periphery not a periphery? 

Lynda Pratt, Tea and national history? Ann Yearsley, John Thelwall and the late-eighteenth-century provincial English epic

Peter Hanns Reill, The Enlightenment from the German periphery: Johann Herder's reinterpretation of the Enlightenment

Volume de la collection prestigieuse SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century) chez la Voltaire Foundation.

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