In this provocative work, Roger Chartier continues his extraordinarily influential consideration of the forms of production, dissemination, and interpretation of discourse in Early Modern Europe. Chartier here examines the relationship between patronage and the market, and explores how the form in which a text is transmitted not only constrains the production of meaning but defines and constructs its audience.
Reknowned historian Roger Chartier, one of the most brilliant and productive of the younger generation of French writers and scholars now at work refashioning the Annales tradition, attempts in this book to analyze the causes of the French revolution not simply by investigating its “cultural origins” but by pinpointing the conditions that “made is possible because conceivable.” Chartier has set himself two important tasks. First, while acknowledging the seminal contribution of Daniel Mornet’s Les origens intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1935), he synthesizes the half-century of scholarship that has created a sociology of culture for Revolutionary France, from education reform through widely circulated printed literature to popular expectations of government and society. Chartier goes beyond Mornet’s work, not be revising that classic text but by raising questions that would not have occurred to its author. Chartier’s second contribution is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that there is a necessary link between the profound cultural transformation of the eighteenth century (generally characterized as the Enlightenment) and the abrupt Revolutionary rupture of 1789. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution is a major work by one of the leading scholars in the field and is likely to set the intellectual agenda for future work on the subject.
The first book-length presentation of Roger Chartier's work in English, this volume provides a vivid example of the new directions of cultural history in France. These essays probe the impact of printing on all social classes of the ancien regime and reveal the surprising range of ways in which texts and pictures were used by audiences with different levels of literacy. Professor Chartier demonstrates that those who attempted to regulate behavior and thought on behalf of church or state, for example, were well aware of the wide influence of the printed word. He finds fascinating evidence of fundamental processes of social control in texts such as the guides to a good death or the treatises on norms of civility, rules that originated at court but that were eventually appropriated in various forms by society as a whole. Essays on the evolution on the fete, on the cahiers de doleances of 1789, and on the early paperback genre known as the Bibliotheque bleue complete the picture of what people read and why and of what was published and what influenced the publishers. These essays offer a critical reappraisal of the complex connections between the new culture of print and the oral and ritual-oriented forms of traditional culture. The reader will discover essential patterns of the cultural evolution of France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Roger Chartier is Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Roger Chartier examines how authors transformed the material realities of writing or of publication into an aesthetic resource exploited for poetic, dramatic, or narrative ends.
In 1988, the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the leading historian Roger Chartier met for a series of lively discussions that were broadcast on French public radio. Published here for the first time, these conversations are an accessible and engaging introduction to the work of these two great thinkers, who discuss their work and explore the similarities and differences between their disciplines with the clarity and frankness of the spoken word. Bourdieu and Chartier discuss some of the core themes of Bourdieu’s work, such as his theory of fields, his notions of habitus and symbolic power and his account of the relation between structures and individuals, and they examine the relevance of these ideas to the study of historical events and processes. They also discuss at length Bourdieu’s work on culture and aesthetics, including his work on Flaubert and Manet and his analyses of the formation of the literary and artistic fields. Reflecting on the differences between sociology and history, Bourdieu and Chartier observe that while history deals with the past, sociology is dealing with living subjects who are often confronted with discourses that speak about them, and therefore it disrupts, disconcerts and encounters resistance in ways that few other disciplines do. This unique dialogue between two great figures is a testimony to the richness of Bourdieu’s thought and its enduring relevance for the humanities and social sciences today.
In Early Modern Europe the first readers of a book were not those who bought it. They were the scribes who copied the author’s or translator’s manuscript, the censors who licensed it, the publisher who decided to put this title in his catalogue, the copy editor who prepared the text for the press, divided it and added punctuation, the typesetters who composed the pages of the book, and the proof reader who corrected them. The author’s hand cannot be separated from the printers’ mind. This book is devoted to the process of publication of the works that framed their readers’ representations of the past or of the world. Linking cultural history, textual criticism and bibliographical studies, dealing with canonical works - like Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s plays - as well as lesser known texts, Roger Chartier identifies the fundamental discontinuities that transformed the circulation of the written word between the invention of printing and the definition, three centuries later, of what we call 'literature'.
In The Order of Books, Chartier examines the different systems required to regulate the world of writing through the centuries, from the registration of titles to the classification of works.
In Won in Translation Roger Chartier, one of the world's leading historians of books, publishing, and reading, considers the mobility of the early modern text and the plurality of circulating versions of the same work. The agent for both is translation, for through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators always assign new meaning or new status to what they translate. Won in Translation proceeds by way of four case studies, three dedicated to works originally in Spanish, the fourth to a Portuguese dramatic adaptation of Don Quixote. Bartolomé de Las Casas' Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, first printed in 1552, was a powerful instrument for the construction of what was later called the "black legend" of Spanish monarchy. Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo Manual, published in 1647, became the most famous courtier's manual in Europe. Both traveled more widely and were translated more often than any other books of their era. For Chartier they illustrate the great power of translation, which allowed Las Casas' account to be placed in multiple and successive contexts and enabled Gracián's book to take on a range of meanings it had not originally had. Chartier's next two chapters are devoted to plays, one by Lope de Vega, the other by Antônio José da Silva. In the case of Lope's Fuente Ovejuna, the "translation" was one from historical chronicle to dramatic performance. In Antônio José da Silva's Vida do Grande D. Quixote, the textual migration is twofold, as Cervantes' hero moves from Spanish to Portuguese and from novel to play. In an Epilogue, Chartier moves three centuries forward to consider the paradox that it is the absolute immobility of the text, "reinvented" word for word, that creates its mobility in Jorge Luis Borges' fiction "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Works are transformed through changes of genre or language, to be sure; but even when the texts remain fixed, their readers give them different or inverted meaning.
In this new book, Roger Chartier and his associates explore the history of a cultural practice that has become common and widespread: the writing of letters. They begin by examining the invention of norms for writing letters in the Middle Ages, and the fixing of these norms in popular manuals of various kinds. They then analyse the letterwriting models developed in the ancien regimes, showing how these models were linked to court literature, on the one hand, and to the popular books distributed by pedlars, on the other. Finally, they discuss the models of letter-writing developed during the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, they argue, was a decisive period in the history of letter-writing, partly because of the rapid rise in rates of literacy and partly due to broader social and economic transformations which increased the need for writing letters.
How should we read a text that does not exist, or present a playthe manuscript of which is lost and the identity of whose authorcannot be established for certain? Such is the enigma posed by Cardenio – a playperformed in England for the first time in 1612 or 1613 andattributed forty years later to Shakespeare (and Fletcher). Itsplot is that of a ‘novella’ inserted into Don Quixote,a work that circulated throughout the major countries of Europe,where it was translated and adapted for the theatre. In England,Cervantes’ novel was known and cited even before it wastranslated in 1612 and had inspired Cardenio. But there is more at stake in this enigma. This was a time when,thanks mainly to the invention of the printing press, there was aproliferation of discourses. There was often a reaction when it wasfeared that this proliferation would become excessive, and manywritings were weeded out. Not all were destined to survive, inparticular plays for the theatre, which, in many cases, were neverpublished. This genre, situated at the bottom of the literaryhierarchy, was well suited to the existence of ephemeral works.However, if an author became famous, the desire for an archive ofhis works prompted the invention of textual relics, the restorationof remainders ruined by the passing of time or, in order to fill inthe gaps, in some cases, even the fabrication of forgeries. Suchwas the fate of Cardenio in the eighteenth century. Retracing the history of this play therefore leads one to wonderabout the status, in the past, of works today judged to becanonical. In this book the reader will rediscover the malleabilityof texts, transformed as they were by translations and adaptations,their migrations from one genre to another, and their changingmeanings constructed by their various publics. Thanks to RogerChartier’s forensic skills, fresh light is cast upon themystery of a play lacking a text but not an author.
Chartier examines various approaches to the history of cultural forms, including the work of the Annales tradition, the contributions of Foucault and Elias, and the more recent writings of Robert Darnton, Carlo Ginzburg and others. The second part of the volume offers a series of case studies. Chartier explores, among other things, the cultural significance of symbolic role reversals, the representations of peasant reading practices in the Age of Enlightenment, and the role of intellectuals in the universities and labour markets of early modern Europe. Through these case studies Chartier elaborates the elements of a highly original approach to the history of cultural forms.
Reknowned historian Roger Chartier attempts in this book to analyze the causes of the French revolution not simply by investigating its "cultural origins" but by pinpointing the conditions that "made is possible because conceivable." Chartier has set himself two important tasks. First, he synthesizes the half-century of scholarship that has created a sociology of culture for Revolutionary France, from education reform through widely circulated printed literature to popular expectations of government and society. Chartier's second contribution is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that there is a necessary link between the profound cultural transformation of the eighteenth century (generally characterized as the Enlightenment) and the abrupt Revolutionary rupture of 1789. "The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution" is a major work by one of the leading scholars in the field and is likely to set the intellectual agenda for future work on the subject. -- From product description.
In 1988, the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the leading historian Roger Chartier met for a series of lively discussions that were broadcast on French public radio. Published here for the first time, these conversations are an accessible and engaging introduction to the work of these two great thinkers, who discuss their work and explore the similarities and differences between their disciplines with the clarity and frankness of the spoken word. Bourdieu and Chartier discuss some of the core themes of Bourdieu’s work, such as his theory of fields, his notions of habitus and symbolic power and his account of the relation between structures and individuals, and they examine the relevance of these ideas to the study of historical events and processes. They also discuss at length Bourdieu’s work on culture and aesthetics, including his work on Flaubert and Manet and his analyses of the formation of the literary and artistic fields. Reflecting on the differences between sociology and history, Bourdieu and Chartier observe that while history deals with the past, sociology is dealing with living subjects who are often confronted with discourses that speak about them, and therefore it disrupts, disconcerts and encounters resistance in ways that few other disciplines do. This unique dialogue between two great figures is a testimony to the richness of Bourdieu’s thought and its enduring relevance for the humanities and social sciences today.
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