Open Access Edition of Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France, by Tili Boon Cuille

FAIN: DR-286798-22

Stanford University (Stanford, CA 94305-2004)
Michael A. Keller (Project Director: November 2021 to September 2024)

This project will publish the book Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France, written by Fellow Tili Boon Cuille (NEH fellowship award number FEL-257164-18) in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France
Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781503614178
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Author: Tili Boon Cuillé
Abstract: The Enlightenment remains widely associated with the rise of scientific progress and the loss of religious faith, a dual tendency that is thought to have contributed to the disenchantment of the world. In her wide-ranging and richly illustrated book, Tili Boon Cuillé questions the accuracy of this narrative by investigating the fate of the marvelous in the age of reason. Exploring the affinities between the natural sciences and the fine arts, Cuillé examines the representation of natural phenomena—whether harmonious or discordant—in natural history, painting, opera, and the novel from Buffon and Rameau to Ossian and Staël. She demonstrates that philosophical, artistic, and emotional responses to the "spectacle of nature" in eighteenth-century France included wonder, enthusiasm, melancholy, and the "sentiment of divinity." These "passions of the soul," traditionally associated with religion and considered antithetical to enlightenment, were linked to the faculties of reason, imagination, and memory that structured Diderot's Encyclopédie and to contemporary theorizations of the sublime. As Cuillé reveals, the marvelous was not eradicated but instead preserved through the establishment and reform of major French cultural institutions dedicated to science, art, religion, and folklore that were designed to inform, enchant, and persuade.
Primary URL: https://sup.org/openebook/9781503614178/
Primary URL Description: Stanford University Press Open Access
Secondary URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.8305919?searchText=Divining%20Nature%3A%20Aesthetics%20of%20Enchantment%20in%20Enlightenment%20France&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ftheme%3Dopen%26Query%3DDivining%2520Nature%3A%2520Aesthetics%2520of%2520Enchantment
Secondary URL Description: JSTOR
URL 3: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/76665
URL 3 Description: OAPEN
URL 4: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781503614178/html
URL 4 Description: De Gruyter
Type: Single author monograph

---