Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance - Hardcover

Hodges, Elisabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0754662063 ISBN 13: 9780754662068

Publisher: Routledge, 2008

Synopsis

The 'city view' forms the jumping off point for this innovative study, which explores how the concept of the city relates to the idea of the self in early modern French narratives. At a time when print culture, cartography and literature emerged and developed together, the 'city view', a picture or topographic image of a city, became one of the most distinctive and popular products of the early modern period. Through a construct she calls 'urban poetics', Elisabeth Hodges draws out the relationship between the city and the self, showing the impact of the city in cultural production to be so profound that it cannot be extricated from what we know by the name of 'subjectivity'. Each chapter of the book brings focus to a crucial text that features descriptions of the self in the city (by the writers Villon, Corrozet, Scève, and Montaigne) and investigate how representations of urban experience prepared the way for the emergence of the autonomous subject. Charting a course between cartography, literary studies, and cultural history, this study opens new vistas on some of the period's defining problems: the book, the subject, the city.

About this title

About the Author

Elisabeth Hodges is Associate Professor of French at Miami University of Ohio, USA.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0754662063
• ISBN 13: 9780754662068
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 162