For an Aesthetic and Non-teleological Reinterpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761)
Abstract
This article examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) through the framework of rococo aesthetics, considered here as an operative critical category within literary studies. It aims to challenge teleological interpretations that label the novel as “pre-Romantic”. The central hypothesis is that Julie fully belongs to eighteenth-century rococo sensibility, marked by grace, intimacy, the regulated theatricality of affection, and the moral integration of feeling. Methodologically, the study combines an aesthetic analysis of the text with its cultural and historiographical contextualization. This rereading aims to restore the novel’s aesthetic coherence and to assert the existence of a genuinely literary rococo, thereby contributing to its recognition as an autonomous interpretive framework.
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