Introduction: The Spectacle of Nature
1. The Marvels of Nature in Buffon and Rameau
2. The Philosophy of Nature in Diderot and Rousseau
3. The Harmony of Nature in Paul et Virginie
4. The Poetics of Nature in Ossian and Staël
Epilogue: A Theater of Enchantment
Tili Boon Cuillé is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (2006).
"Genuinely interdisciplinary and drawing on an astonishing range of sources, Divining Nature is a remarkable achievement. Tili Boon Cuillé demonstrates that enchantment and the sentiment of the divine lie at the heart of scientific and aesthetic debates in the eighteenth century and are in no way antithetical to the spirit of the Enlightenment."—Joanna Stalnaker, Columbia University "Overturning a number of critical and historical clichés about the Enlightenment's role in disenchanting the world, Tili Boon Cuillé recovers a bold and original vision of the continuing role that enchantment played in the Age of Reason in France."—Göran Blix, Princeton University "Divining Nature is laudably ambitious. In a moment of strident and sometimes caricatural critique of the Enlightenment as a bastion of whiteness, colonial violence, and epistemic imperialism, Divining Nature offers a more capacious, nuanced, and agile vision, one based on epistemological humility, the transcendence of personal, cultural, and conceptual boundaries, and the rooting of aesthetic pleasure in the sympathetic identification with the other."—Ryan Whyte, Eighteenth-Century Fiction "Tili Boon Cuillé's newest book, Divining Nature, is a truly valuable contribution to the state of French Enlightenment studies today, convincingly demonstrating what is becoming increasingly apparent: that this movement was neither a clean break with the past, nor a definitive rejection of religion and spirituality, nor a neat split between the sciences and the arts."—Hanna Roman, H-France
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