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Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France

By (author) Tili Boon CuillÃ©

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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 CuillÃ© 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, CuillÃ© examines the representation of natural phenomenaâ€”whether harmonious or discordantâ€”in natural history, painting, opera, and the novel from Buffon and Rameau to Ossian and StaÃ«l. 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 EncyclopÃ©die and to contemporary theorizations of the sublime. As CuillÃ© 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. This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.