Publishing And Cultural Politics In Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810

Publishing And Cultural Politics In Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810
by Carla Alison Hesse

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Book Description
In 1789 French revolutionaries initiated a cultural experiment that radically transformed the most basic elements of French literary civilization--authorship, printing, and publishing. In a panoramic analysis, Carla Hesse tells how the Revolution shook the Parisian printing and publishing world from top to bottom, liberating the trade from absolutist institutions and inaugurating a free-market exchange of ideas.
Historians and literary critics have traditionally viewed the French Revolution as a catastrophe for French literary culture. Combing through extensive new archival sources, Hesse finds instead that revolutionaries intentionally dismantled the elite literary civilization of the Old Regime to create unprecedented access to the printed word. Exploring the uncharted terrains of popular fiction, authors' rights, and literary life under the Terror, Carla Hesse offers a new perspective on the relationship between democratic revolutions and modern cultural life.

From the Inside Flap
"A book whose implications extend far beyond the geographical and temporal boundaries of its subject. Anyone who wishes to know the answer to Foucault's famous question, 'What is an author?', should start here with Hesse's illuminating study of the transformation of the author from the privileged creation of the absolutist state, to the civic hero of public enlightenment, to the bourgeois head of household. . . . The consequences of the political, economic, and ideological struggles so brilliantly explored in this book continue to shape our own cultural politics."--Stephen Greenblatt, author of Shakespearean Negotiations

From the Back Cover
"A book whose implications extend far beyond the geographical and temporal boundaries of its subject. Anyone who wishes to know the answer to Foucault's famous question, 'What is an author?', should start here with Hesse's illuminating study of the transformation of the author from the privileged creation of the absolutist state, to the civic hero of public enlightenment, to the bourgeois head of household. . . . The consequences of the political, economic, and ideological struggles so brilliantly explored in this book continue to shape our own cultural politics." (Stephen Greenblatt, author of Shakespearean Negotiations)

About the Author
Carla Hesse is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She was Research Curator for the bicentennial exhibition, "Revolution in Print: France, 1789," at the New York Public Library in 1989.

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