Frontiers of Modernity

This programme on European modernity (focusing on France and Great Britain) from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century is an interdisciplinary initiative. The researchers brought together under its umbrella share interests in the history of ideas and knowledge, in philosophy and literature, and in common questions relating to the Early Modern period. Starting from case studies, the project seeks to understand the processes through which modernity is constructed, working principally from a comparison between France and Great Britain but also remaining alive to broader perspectives.

The group thus focuses on the question of modernity not by attempting to formulate a straightforward definition of the term, or by giving it any all-encompassing meaning, but instead by finding ways of approaching it at its margins, of understanding its constituent parts. The research therefore takes the form not of an investigation into the progress of modernity, but rather that of an inquiry into the processes that has led to the formulation, delimitation or exclusion of knowledge from its domain. In short, modernity is not understood as an initial fixed point, but as the horizon that gives rise to the inquiry.

In 2004-8, the programme was generously supported by the ACI-TTT (Ministry of Research), allowing the organization of numerous study events and the furthering of research in the framework of a bi-monthly seminar. Publication of these proceedings is now well under way, with two volumes due to appear into 2008. The first, entitled The Figure of the Philosopher in the Modern Era, documents the acts of two study days held on the subject in conjunction with the IRCL, Montpellier. The second, provisionally called Frontier Fictions : Law, Literature and Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, is the outcome of research on the uses of fiction in the modern era.

The project is at present focused on the concept of the “case”, investigating processes circulation of knowledge starting from isolated events rather than from overarching grand theories.

The project “Reading the European novel : from the Renaissance to the Lumières”, directed by Nathalie Ferrand and funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, has been central to the “Frontiers of Modernity” project since September 2007. Taking a comparative approach to the history of literary circulation and based on research in European archives, the project embraces several cultural arenas (France, Britain, Italy, Germany), aiming to write a history of novel-reading in Europe in order to redefine the novelistic literary object through the study of its audiences and their perceptions. The frontiers touched upon by this line of research are thus not only geographical, but also disciplinary and methodological. To bring study of the novel alongside broader histories of the book, of reading, and of cultural transfer is to tackle corpuses that have until now been kept out of literary approaches – translated or illustrated works, for example, since translation and illustration must be considered two major forms of reception of works during the period under study. It is this aspect that has led a first initiative of the programme towards the publication of a collective volume, “Translating and Illustrating the Novel in the Europe of the Lumières”, to which several Oxford researchers have contributed. As well as providing a space for consideration of the fields that are reinvigorating research on the novel in the century of the Lumières, “Reading the Novel” aims to examine the relationship between fiction and the visual culture in the eighteenth century, and to create a catalogue of the illustrated novel. Collaborations on the subject with British colleagues from Oxford, Cardiff, London and Manchester have rapidly taken shape, and a first study day on “Literary illustration: reflections and experiences of Franco-British research” in spring 2008 will be followed by other workshops. In November, a seminar on “The French novel outside France between the Classical age and the Enlightenment” will provide another occasion to think about the forms and contexts of writing and reading the French novel beyond the scene of its original production.