Unsettling Montaigne: Poetics, Ethics and Affect in the Essais and Other Writings

By Elizabeth Guild

Montaigne's Essais (1580-1592) are one of the most remarkable works of the European Renaissance. The Essais' innovative open-mindedness is at odds with the dogmatism and intolerance of their times, the decades of civil and religious wars in France, and their tolerant and searching human questions and ethics of difference remain compelling for twenty-first century readers. But the sceptical open-endedness that vitalizes this writing is also often troubled and troubling: personal losses and the collapse of cultural ideals moved Montaigne to write, and their attendant anxieties are not resolved into tranquil reflection. Unsettling Montaigne reassesses Montaigne's scepticism. Informed by psychoanalytic and related theory, its close attention to Montaigne's complex uses of metaphor illuminates the psychic economy of his scepticism and tolerance and their poetics, while new readings of his Essais and other texts reveal the significance of disquieting questions, thought and affect for the ethos his writing fosters

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1843843714
• ISBN13: 9781843843719
• Release Date: April 2014
• Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"