Download or read book Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-century France written by Edward Nye and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Linguistic" theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as "aesthetic" theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question "what is beauty?," but formulated, also, to respond to contemporary concerns. Edward Nye considers a wide range of authors from these two perspectives and draws the following conclusions: etymology is a theory of poetry, dictionaries of synonymy, prosody and metaphor are theories of preciosity, and Sensualism is a theory of artistic representation.