Prelude to the Enlightenment: French Literature 1690-1740

First published in 1971, Prelude to the Enlightenment is a study of the attitudes of French writers during the transition from the Classical Age to the Enlightenment. Professors Atkinson and Keller investigate the increasing vogue for emotionalism, weeping, and confession and attitudes towards love and morality. On a more intellectual plane, the approaches of authors of the time to literary questions and their treatment of the world of reality. This book presents wide range of quotations from many writers of the period 1690 to 1740 – among them Mativaux; l’Abbé Prévost; Saint-Evremond; the novelists Robert Chasles, Mme Aubin, Mme de Tencin and la Comtesse d’Aulnoy; the remarkable and little-known writer Jean Buvat, who worked as a copyist in the Royal Library and wrote the Journal de la Régence; and l’Abbé Pluche, author of Le Spectacle de la Nature. Some of these are well known, some virtually unheard of, but all provide clues to the character of the age. By combining their own comments with contemporary quotations, Professors Atkinson and Keller give modern readers a feeling for the atmosphere of the period that followed the Golden Age and a deeper appreciation of the literature of the Enlightenment itself.