Long description:

In mid-eighteenth-century Paris, the encyclopedists launched a campaign to radically redefine the public dimension of all ?imaginative? arts, starting with music ? with the querelle des bouffons ? then theatre, the novel and finally the visual arts. Diderot, Rousseau and the Politics of the Arts in the Enlightenment exposes the correlation between the prejudices and hierarchies of the political and social system of the time and what d?Alembert calls ?literary superstitions?. The book reconstructs the role of Diderot and Rousseau, fr?res ennemis, as they engaged in a dispute that was above all else political, despite revolving entirely around forms of artistic expression. Throwing a light on this important cultural event is all the more necessary because the essentially political dimension of Diderot?s Salons has since the nineteenth-century been completely obscured from view. Indeed, at first misunderstood and then totally neglected, for over two centuries their true significance has been systematically ignored by the aesthetic-idealist school of criticism.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Introduction

Part I: The Beginnings: Music, Theatre, the Novel

Chapter 1. The problem of the theatrical Ancien régime: Musical opera

Chapter 2. Stage theatre: The real substance of the dispute                    

Chapter 3: A ?politics? of the novel and the chasm between ancient and modern

Chapter 4. The function and destiny of badly written theatre

Part II: The Subverters of the Artistic Culture of the Ancien régime

Chapter 5: The Moment of the Fine Arts

Chapter 6: Optical Illusions, and a Necessary Premise

Chapter 7: Diderot and the Art of Politics for All

Chapter 8: Painters and genres: norms, reality, the response of the market

Chapter 9: New Spaces, Old Obligations

Part III: In the Infernal Workshop of the Salons of Painting

Chapter 10: Diderot, Rousseau and the ?Citizen? Artist

Chapter 11: Towards a ?Politics? of the Sublime

Chapter 12: The Dignity of the Masses and the Eternal ?Lie? of Allegory

Chapter 13: All that Others never Wrote

Part IV: Finale   

Chapter 14: Concluding remarks and epilogue

Bibliography