Claude Crébillon, Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit [The Wayward Head and Heart]

Marine Ganofsky (University of St Andrews)

Ed. by Jenny Mander, University of Cambridge
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.04: French Writing and Culture: Eighteenth-Century and the Enlightenment, 1700-1800.
Vol. editors: Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Jenny Mander (University of Cambridge), Síofra Pierse (University College Dublin), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1736 - 1738

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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The story of Meilcour’s sentimental education and initiation to the ways of eighteenth-century worldliness may not be the novel which brought its author either fame or literary recognition in his own time. Still, Crébillon’s

Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit

[The Wayward Head and Heart] is a text which readers, scholars, and historians have continued to revisit, if not for the early modern circumvoluted beauty of the sentences, then for clues about the tacit system of rules associated with the liaisons of Parisian aristocrats during the Regency and early years of Louis XV’s reign. Many readers, like the Earl of Shaftesbury, enjoyed Crébillon’s novel as a guide to France’s “galante” etiquette. More crucially,

Les Égarements du cœur et de l”esprit

has also…

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3865 words

Citation: Ganofsky, Marine. "Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 March 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35885, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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