The epistolary art of Catherine the Great /
The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great is the first study to analyse comprehensively the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (reigned 1762-1796) and to argue that they constitute a masterpiece of eighteenth-century epistolary writing. Kelsey Rubin-Detlev traces Catherine's devel...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford, UK :
Voltaire Foundation,
[2019]
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| Series: | Oxford University studies in the Enlightenment ;
2019:08. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great is the first study to analyse comprehensively the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (reigned 1762-1796) and to argue that they constitute a masterpiece of eighteenth-century epistolary writing. Kelsey Rubin-Detlev traces Catherine's development as a letter-writer, her networking strategies, and her image-making, demonstrating the centrality of ideas, literary experimentation, and manipulation of material form evident in Catherine's epistolary practice. Through this, Rubin-Detlev illustrates how Catherine's letters reveal her full engagement with the Enlightenment and further show how creatively she absorbed and responded to the ideas of her century. The letter was not merely a means by which the empress promoted Russia and its leader as European powers; it was a literary genre through which Catherine expressed her identity as a member of the social, political, and intellectual elite of her century. |
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| Physical Description: | xix, 391 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (353-379) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781789620078 1789620074 |
| ISSN: | 0435-2866 ; |