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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and Their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France

Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and Their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France

Laporta, Kathrina Ann

Hardcover

Series: Early Modern Exchange

Literary CriticismFrench HistoryPerformance Art

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1644532093
ISBN13: 9781644532096
Publisher: Univ Of Delaware Pr
Published: Jun 21 2021
Pages: 338
Language: English
Performative Polemic is the first literary historical study to analyze the war of words unleashed in the pamphlets denouncing Louis XIV's absolute monarchy between 1667 and 1715. As conflict erupted between the French ruler and his political enemies, pamphlet writers across Europe penned scathing assaults on the Sun King's bellicose impulses and expansionist policies. This book investigates how pamphlet writers challenged the monarchy's monopoly over the performance of sovereignty by contesting the very mechanisms through which the crown legitimized its authority at home and abroad. Author Kathrina LaPorta offers a new conceptual framework for reading pamphlets as political interventions, asserting that an analysis of the pamphlet's form is crucial to understanding how pamphleteers seduced readers by capitalizing on existing markets in literature, legal writing, and journalism. Pamphlet writers appeal to the theater-going public that would have been attending plays by Molière and Racine, as well as to readers of historical novels and periodicals. Pamphleteers entertained readers as they attacked the performative circuitry behind the curtain of monarchy.

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