University of Delaware Press Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France (The Early Modern Exchange)

Performative Polemic is the first literary historical study to analyze the “war of words” unleashed in the pamphlets denouncing Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy between 1667 and 1715. As conflict erupted between the French ruler and his political enemies, pamphlet writers across Europe penned scathing assaults on the his bellicose impulses and expansionist policies. This book investigates how pamphlet writers challenged the monarchy’s monopoly over the performance of sovereignty by contesting the very mechanisms through which the crown legitimized its authority at home and abroad. Author Kathrina LaPorta offers a new conceptual framework for reading pamphlets as political interventions, asserting that an analysis of the pamphlet’s form is crucial to understanding how pamphleteers seduced readers by capitalizing on existing markets in literature, legal writing, and journalism. Pamphlet writers appealed to the theater-going public that would have been attending plays by MoliÈre and Racine, as well as to readers of historical novels and periodicals. Pamphleteers entertained readers as they attacked the performative circuitry behind the curtain of monarchy. About the Author KATHRINA LAPORTA is a lecturer in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. A specialist of early modern France, her research interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, material history, and critical theory. Her work has appeared in Early Modern French Studies, French Studies Bulletin, and the Cahiers du dix-septiÈme: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is preparing an online critical edition of anti-absolutist pamphlets with Christophe Schuwey, a project funded by a grant from the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College.