Timothée Léchot

L’exception qui confirme les règles :
le génie littéraire de Rousseau perçu par Isabelle de Charrière et Henri-David Chaillet

Abstract

Among Charrière’s chief interlocutors at Colombier one finds the pas-tor Henri-David Chaillet, who shared her admiration of Rousseau. Ex-erting a mutual influence on each other, the two writers develop simi-lar points of view, the comparison of which tells us much about how Charrière and Chaillet read his philosophical ideas and how they ap-preciated his style as an author. Both keen on the rules of classicism, Charrière and Chaillet endeavour to understand Rousseau within an aesthetic framework that has become insufficient to account for his writing. Several rhetoric strategies are developed by them to convey what they perceive as Rousseau’s singularity while contemplating the possibility of locating him within a French literary pantheon.

SvD, December 2012

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• Publications > Belle de Zuylen Papers > 2012