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T. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy. Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

T. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy. Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la maison d'édition)

HAMPTON, Tomothy, Fictions of Embassy. Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2009, 256 p.

ISBN 978-0-8014-4775-4

RÉSUMÉ

Historians of early modern Europe have long stressed how new practicesof diplomacy that emerged during the period transformed Europeanpolitics. Fictions of Embassy is the first book to examine the culturalimplications of the rise of modern diplomacy. Ranging across two and ahalf centuries and half a dozen languages, Timothy Hampton opens a newperspective on the intersection of literature and politics at the dawnof modernity.
Hamptonargues that literary texts-tragedies, epics, essays-use scenes ofdiplomatic negotiation to explore the relationship between politics andaesthetics, between the world of political rhetoric and the dynamics ofliterary form. The diplomatic encounter is a scene of cultural exchangeand linguistic negotiation. Literary depictions of diplomacy offeroccasions for reflection on the definition of genre, on the power ofrepresentation, on the limits of rhetoric, on the nature of fictionmaking itself. Conversely, discussions of diplomacy by jurists,political philosophers, and ambassadors deploy the tools of literarytradition to articulate new theories of political action. Hamptonaddresses these topics through a discussion of the major diplomaticwriters between 1450 and 1700-Machiavelli, Grotius, Gentili,Guicciardini-and through detailed readings of literary works thataddress the same topics-works by Shakespeare, More, Rabelais,Montaigne, Tasso, Corneille, Racine, and Camoens. He demonstrates thatthe issues raised by diplomatic theorists helped shape the emergence ofnew literary forms, and that literature provides a lens through whichwe can learn to read the languages of diplomacy.

BIOGRAPHIE

Timothy Hampton is Professor of French and holds the Bernie H. WilliamsChair of Comparative Literature at the University of California,Berkeley. He is the author of Writing from History: The Rhetoric ofExemplarity in Renaissance Literature and Literature and Nation in theSixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France, both from Cornell.

  • Responsable :
    Timothy Hampton