Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and Their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France
(Part of the The Early Modern Exchange Series)
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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 Moli?re 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.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:1644532093
ISBN13:9781644532096
Release Date:June 2021
Publisher:University of Delaware Press
Length:338 Pages
Age Range:18 years and up
Grade Range:Postsecondary and higher
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