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- Title
Forgotten Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France.
- Authors
Burrows, Simon
- Abstract
This paper explores some of the initial findings from the industrial scale database-empowered study of the French book trade in the late Enlightenment now be undertaken by a team of scholars at Western Sydney University. It discusses the various methods past scholars have used to attempt to chart the production and dissemination of the best-selling texts of the enlightenment era, both in the analogue and the digital ages, and why they have and continue to offer such radically divergent results. It demonstrates how by combining, understanding and analyzing multiple digital datasets we are beginning to get an understanding of the printed output of francophone Europe in the enlightenment and hence gain new understandings of the production, circulation, reception and uses of print in the eighteenth century. And it introduces some of the most popular best-sellers of the era, works concerned with the humdrum ordinary business of living, making money and dying, arguing that more attention needs to be paid to their cultural significance and its implications. When we do that, important new understandings of the culture of the era begin to emerge.
- Subjects
FRANCE; ENLIGHTENMENT; FRENCH Revolution, 1789-1799; FRENCH history
- Publication
French History & Civilization, 2017, Vol 7, p51
- ISSN
1832-9683
- Publication type
Article