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Cornell University Press
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In The Unfinished Enlightenment, Joanna Stalnaker 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 such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier.

Stalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the now habitual association between description and the novel was already firmly anchored in French culture, but just a century earlier, in the diverse network of articles on description in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and in the works derived from it, there was not a single mention of the novel. Instead, we find articles on description in natural history, geometry, belles-lettres, and poetry. Stalnaker builds on the premise that the tendency to view description as the inevitable (and subservient) partner of narration—rather than as a universal tool for making sense of knowledge in all fields—has obscured the central place of description in Enlightenment discourse. As a result, we have neglected some of the most original and experimental works of the eighteenth century.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
  2. p. C
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  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. pp. i-vi
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. Figures
  2. pp. ix-x
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  1. Preface
  2. pp. xi-xiii
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. xv-xvi
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  1. Introduction
  2. pp. 1-28
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  1. Part I Natural Histories
  1. 1 Buffon and Daubenton’s Two Horses
  2. pp. 31-67
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  1. 2 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Strawberry Plant
  2. pp. 68-96
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  1. Part II Encyclopedias
  1. 3 Diderot’s Word Machine
  2. pp. 99-123
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  1. 4 Delille’s Little Encyclopedia
  2. pp. 124-148
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  1. Part III Moral and Political Topographies
  1. 5 Mercier’s Unframed Paris
  2. pp. 151-187
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  1. 6 Description in Revolution
  2. pp. 188-210
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  1. Conclusion
  2. pp. 211-218
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  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 219-232
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 233-240
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