This book provides an expansive view of celebrity's intimate dimensions. In the process, it offers a timely reassessment of how notions of private and public were negotiated by writers, readers, actors and audiences in the early to mid-eighteenth century. The essays assembled here explore the lives of a wide range of figures: actors and actresses, but also politicians, churchmen, authors and rogues; some who courted celebrity openly and others who seemed to achieve it almost inadvertently. At a time when the topic of celebrity's origins is attracting unprecedented scholarly attention, this collection is an important, pioneering resource.
Ce volume de Transversales constitue le septième volet des travaux de spécialistes des études sur le dix-huitième siècle français et britannique. Ces chercheurs tentent de redéfinir les modes opératoires de la sociabilité pour chacune des deux nations, à partir de sources célèbres ou méconnues, et s'interrogent sur la réalité de la supériorité du modèle français de sociabilité. Le présent volume s'intéresse plus particulièrement à la représentation et à la réinvention des espaces de sociabilité à partir de sources diverses, correspondance, oeuvres littéraires, archives de sociétés, essais philosophiques, films. Il met en évidence les dimensions urbanistiques et transgressives de l'espace, sa dualité, en étant à la fois imaginaire et physique et s'interroge sur le rôle de l'être humain, acteur et spectateur. La représentation des espaces de sociabilité, telle qu'elle est abordée dans cet ouvrage, pose la question de l'autorité et de la négociation opérée par l'individu entre liberté et appartenance à un groupe socio-culturel lui-même indissociable d' une nation en devenir.
This volume is the seventh in the Transversales series published by a group of researchers of different nationalities on the topic of sociability in France and Britain during the Enlightenment. The research focuses on the extent to which a new model of sociability emerged in these nations during this period, and the similarities and differences between the ways this model developed on each side of the Channel. The present volume examines the representation and reinvention of sociable spaces through an excavation of various sources, letters, literary works, archives of societies, philosophical essays, films. It highlights the urbanistic and transgressive aspects of space, its duality, as it is at once physical and imaginary, and it questions the role of human beings, both as actors and spectators. The representation of sociable spaces, as it is dealt with in this work, raises the issue of authority and of the negotiation enacted by the individual between freedom and the membership of a socio-cultural group that is inseparable from a nation in the making.
