For centuries the histories of France and Germany have been linked in ways productive and destructive, and each nation's sense of itself has often been shaped by admiration of or hostility toward the other. Harold Mah explores the interweaving paths of German and French cultural identity that emerged in the Enlightenment and continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.Mah argues that the efforts of German and French intellectuals and artists to formulate stable cultural identities constantly collapsed in the face of other powerful images and the rush of history. In Mah's view, these shifting conceptions of cultural identity are problematic phantasies, internally unstable and prone to falling apart under the pressure of events, only to be replaced by new, equally problematic constructions. Mah offers fresh analyses of a wide range of iconic texts and artworks, including those of Jacques-Louis David, de Staël, Diderot, and Rousseau in France and Goethe, Hegel, Herder, Mann, Marx, and Nietzsche in Germany.Mah's book examines how attempts to define cultural identities were caught up in issues of language, gender, classical revival, politics, and modernity. Enlightenment Phantasies presents the shaping of cultural identity in narratives accessible not only to specialists but also to students and all readers concerned with the history of Western culture.

In this concise, bold, and innovative book, Dan Edelstein offers us an original account of the Enlightenment. It convincingly argues that the Enlightenment is above all a narrative about social and cultural changes and that its origins can be found in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Therefore, by reconsidering the importance of the French esprit philosophique in the Euroean Enlightenment, this book will be of considerable importance for every scholar and student interested in this period.

The secret to enlightenment is a whole lot simpler than you think. Forget the chanting, meditating and expensive visits to ashrams and get back to basics. The need to find purpose and meaning in the world has become more important to many people in the 21st century, especially with our 24/7 access to information. But just because you can now seek out the most expensive meditation retreats around the world via the Internet doesn't mean you should. Would it surprise you to learn that everything you need to know to be at peace with yourself can be found without ever having to venture out of your front door? Welcome to the no BS approach to enlightenment Meet Joey Lott and Fish (yes, that's his name). They're down to earth, back-to-basics guys (Fish is an ex-navy diver), and they are tired of the airy-fairy, flowery approach to enlightenment. Rather, they eschew terms like "spirituality" and are willing to speak simply, directly, and as Lott notes, "crudely" - hence the title of this book. By stripping away the artifice that surrounds people's attempts to understand themselves and their place in the universe, these guys offer up their straight to the point approach on attaining enlightenment and understanding by revealing that freedom's just another word for how to be at peace with who you really are. Frank dialogue as a gateway to understanding. When was the last time you said what you really meant, censorship be damned? Lott and Fish aren't afraid to dig deep. Fish will walk you through his own personal story, sharing everything from his military training to his struggles with alcoholism. And there's no preaching here. Because unlike other spiritual self-help tomes, Lott and Fish's book is comprised of direct transcripts of actual conversations between the two of them - warts and all. Their exchanges are stark, unvarnished, and uncensored. So if you want to follow a path to understanding your place in the world that doesn't involve subscribing to a specific teacher, guru, or path and doesn't ask you to bend yourself into a pretzel - literally or figuratively - then read Lott and Fish's book and take the road less censored by.

The secret to enlightenment is a whole lot simpler than you think. Forget the chanting, meditating and expensive visits to ashrams and get back to basics. The need to find purpose and meaning in the world has become more important to many people in the 21st century, especially with our 24/7 access to information. But just because you can now seek out the most expensive meditation retreats around the world via the Internet doesn't mean you should. Would it surprise you to learn that everything you need to know to be at peace with yourself can be found without ever having to venture out of your front door? Welcome to the no BS approach to enlightenment Meet Joey Lott and Fish (yes, that's his name). They're down to earth, back-to-basics guys (Fish is an ex-navy diver), and they are tired of the airy-fairy, flowery approach to enlightenment. Rather, they eschew terms like "spirituality" and are willing to speak simply, directly, and as Lott notes, "crudely" - hence the title of this book. By stripping away the artifice that surrounds people's attempts to understand themselves and their place in the universe, these guys offer up their straight to the point approach on attaining enlightenment and understanding by revealing that freedom's just another word for how to be at peace with who you really are. Frank dialogue as a gateway to understanding. When was the last time you said what you really meant, censorship be damned? Lott and Fish aren't afraid to dig deep. Fish will walk you through his own personal story, sharing everything from his military training to his struggles with alcoholism. And there's no preaching here. Because unlike other spiritual self-help tomes, Lott and Fish's book is comprised of direct transcripts of actual conversations between the two of them - warts and all. Their exchanges are stark, unvarnished, and uncensored. So if you want to follow a path to understanding your place in the world that doesn't involve subscribing to a specific teacher, guru, or path and doesn't ask you to bend yourself into a pretzel - literally or figuratively - then read Lott and Fish's book and take the road less censored by.

Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners—from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights—E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing café owner Charles Manoury, the “Turkish envoy” Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d’Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, Eating the Enlightenment will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.

An analysis of the forces which shaped politics and culture in Germany, France and Great Britain in the eighteenth century.

In an age of rising nationalism and expanding colonialism, the science of language has been intimately bound up with questions of immediate political concern. Taken together, the essays in this volume suggest that the emergence of language as an autonomous object of discourse was closely connected with the consolidation of new and sometimes competing forms of political community in the period following the French Revolution and the global spread of European power. This is the common thread running through the seven individual studies gathered here. By deliberately juxtaposing the European, academic configuration of modern linguistic research with the more practical, extra-European activities of missionaries, colonial officials, or East Asian literati, the authors explore the tensions between forms of linguistic knowledge generated in different geopolitical contexts, and suggest ways of thinking about the role of social science in the process of globalization.

"From Optimism to Tenacious Hope: Communication Ethics and the Scottish Enlightenment works with the Scottish Enlightenment as the intellectual and performative background for the illustration of the differentiation between optimism and tenacious hope"--

The dead of Paris, before the French Revolution, were most often consigned to mass graveyards that contemporaries described as terrible and terrifying, emitting "putrid miasmas" that were a threat to both health and dignity. In a book that is at once wonderfully macabre and exceptionally informative, Erin-Marie Legacey explores how a new burial culture emerged in Paris as a result of both revolutionary fervor and public health concerns, resulting in the construction of park-like cemeteries on the outskirts of the city and a vast underground ossuary. Making Space for the Dead describes how revolutionaries placed the dead at the center of their republican project of radical reinvention of French society and envisioned a future where graveyards would do more than safely contain human remains; they would serve to educate and inspire the living. Legacey unearths the unexpectedly lively process by which burial sites were reimagined, built, and used, focusing on three of the most important of these new spaces: the Paris Catacombs, Père Lachaise cemetery, and the short-lived Museum of French Monuments. By situating discussions of death and memory in the nation's broader cultural and political context, as well as highlighting how ordinary Parisians understood and experienced these sites, she shows how the treatment of the dead became central to the reconstruction of Parisian society after the Revolution.

In Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism, John K. Noyes plumbs the connections between Herder s anti-imperialism, often acknowledged but rarely explored in depth, and his epistemological investigations."