Libraries and Enlightenment

Eighteenth-Century Norway and the Outer World

Gina Dahl

• Publisher: Aarhus University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9788771248173
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Books are written to entertain and to inform, and during the Enlightenment, accounts of other worlds became popular as trade routes, scientific and leisure travel to faraway places made the world seem smaller. Books on 'outer worlds', classified in libraries as historia, were very important in conveying distinct perceptions of peoples, places and cultures to readers. These encounters fed into a general eighteenth-century interest in individualization, progress and tolerance. Libraries and Enlightenment. Eighteenth-Century Norway and the Outer World explores how the broader world was presented to a Norwegian audience by means of both statistical analysis of books on 'the other' in Enlightenment libraries, and a consideration of how peoples were portrayed in the works. Book distribution was very uneven, and the views promoted particularly by bestsellers were as multifaceted as the Enlightenment itself as the texts expressed both prejudice and admiration.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Colophon
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part OneThe World in Libraries
• 1 The idea of history
• 2 The art of classification
• 3 Inclusions, exclusions and major patterns of book dissemination
• 4 Worlds nearby and worlds distant
• Part Two The World in Books
• 5 Africa (Johannes Rask and Georg Høst)
• 6 Asia (Carsten Niebuhr and Paul Lucas)
• 7 Russia (Adam Olearius, Peter von Haven)
• 8 America (Jens Kraft, Antonio de Solís/Birgitte Lange)
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix
• Index