Elizabeth Andrews Bond. The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France.

Abstract

Reading The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France recalls the specific dramaturgical approach in Anton Chekhov’s plays called “underwater current.” It describes the hidden internal tensions and communicational complexities in his plays that engage the characters beyond the everyday topics of conversation and finally convey to the audience the conflict and its possible resolution. In a similar vein, the characters in Elizabeth Andrews Bond’s book—the letter writers to the information press in the last decades of the Old Regime and the first years of the French Revolution—may refer to literature, science, agriculture, philanthropy, or politics, but tangentially, their letters draw invisible lines of intellectual exchanges between the writers and their audience. Those lines enhanced their capacity for learning, for asserting themselves into a newborn public sphere, and for establishing norms for public good and national duty in view of the coming revolutionary storm. Through a close...