{"title":"Robert Darnton","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"censors-at-work-how-states-shaped-literature-paperback","title":"Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot's great \u003cem\u003eEncyclopedie\u003c\/em\u003e by hiding the banned project's papers in his Paris townhouse. Relationships at court trumped principle in the Old Regime.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output. Years later the outrage stirred by the British partition of Bengal led the Raj to put this knowledge to use. Seeking to suppress Indian publications that it deemed seditious, the British held hearings in which literary criticism led to prison sentences. Their efforts to meld imperial power and liberal principle fed a growing Indian opposition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society. Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, censors developed annual plans for literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers. A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors' heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation's literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy rooting censorship in the particulars of history, Darnton's revealing study enables us to think more clearly about efforts to control expression past and present.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51366005473503,"sku":"9780393351804","price":26.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/v7WTRnelGj9780393351804.webp?v=1789077274"},{"product_id":"the-writers-lot-culture-and-revolution-in-eighteenth-century-france-hardcover","title":"The Writer's Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics Circle Award winner.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn eighteenth-century France, writers emerged as a new kind of power. They stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the Bourbon monarchy. Whether scribbling in dreary garrets or philosophizing in salons, they exerted so much influence that the state kept them under constant surveillance. A few became celebrities, but most were hacks, and none could survive without patrons or second jobs. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Writer's Lot\u003c\/i\u003e is the first book to move beyond individual biography to take the measure of \"literary France\" as a whole. Historian Robert Darnton parses forgotten letters, manuscripts, police reports, private diaries, and newspapers to show how writers made careers and how they fit into the social order--or didn't. Reassessing long-standing narratives of the French Revolution, Darnton shows that to be a reject was not necessarily to be a Jacobin: the toilers of the Parisian Grub Street sold their words to revolutionary publishers and government ministers alike. And while literary France contributed to the downfall of the ancien régime, it did so through its example more than its ideals: the contradiction inherent in the Republic of Letters--in theory, open to all; in practice, dominated by a well-connected clique--dramatized the oppressiveness of the French social system. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDarnton brings his trademark rigor and investigative eye to the character of literary France, from the culture war that pitted the \"decadent\" Voltaire against the \"radical\" Rousseau to struggling scribblers, booksellers, censors, printers, and royal spies. Their lives, little understood until now, afford rare insight into the ferment of French society during the Age of Revolution.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51368474247391,"sku":"9780674299887","price":26.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/SWhnoJ2p689780674299887.webp?v=1789128490"},{"product_id":"the-revolutionary-temper-paris-1748-1789-hardcover","title":"The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing--how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decades of close study to conjure a past as vivid as today's news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society much like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal's Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, underground newsletters, and public performances, the events of some forty years--from disastrous treaties, official corruption, and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and new understandings of the nation--all entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As public trust in royal authority eroded and new horizons opened for them, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDarnton's authority and sure judgment enable readers to confidently navigate the passions and complexities of controversies over court politics, Church doctrine, and the economy. And his compact, luminous prose creates an immersive reading experience. Here is a riveting narrative that succeeds in making the past a living presence.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51369760489695,"sku":"9781324035589","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/xbbND_bdQ39781324035589.webp?v=1789146117"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/robert-darnton.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}