Styles of Enlightenment

One of those irresistable books which uncover significant and unmistakable but hitherto undetected patterns in well-known material. After reading Elena Russo, it is impossible not to see the French Enlightenment through her revealing prism.

Clear, well-documented book... Highly recommended.

Illuminating and original, Styles of Enlightenment is a welcome addition to eighteenth-century studies.

This absorbing, well-written study will be of tremendous interest to a wide range of readers.

The success of the book lies in Russo's ability to stitch together eighteenth-century literary and ethical theory with Augustinian theology and sociology.

What makes her contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship particularly noteworthy, even groundbreaking, is the new light it sheds on the entire movement of ideas known as the Enlightenment.

Drawing on recent scholarship by Jay Caplan, Gregory Brown, and Joan DeJean, as well as on an abundance of lively quotations from the literature and art criticism of this period, Russo demonstrates that the philosophes' lofty condemnation of modern taste did not prevent them from succumbing to its appeal.

Russo offers a new and critical perspective on the Enlightenment.

Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France rewrites the history of a style that has all too often been dismissed as a marginal by-product of a decadent Regency.