The Art of Friendship in France / L’Art de l’amitié en France, 1789-1914

at Maison Francaise d’Oxford

Oxford, UK, July 19-20

Representations editor Michael Lucey and authors Sharon Marcus and Maurice Samuels with be participating in this two-day conference sponsored by Cambridge University’s The Art of Friendship in France project.

From the project’s description:

Friendship is everywhere. It is almost impossible to imagine a society or culture without it. Yet for a concept that is so immediately, intuitively meaningful to virtually all human beings, friendship has been a famously intractable scholarly problem. Unofficial, uncodified and unregulated (not to mention, very often, unspoken), friendship does not lend itself to clear theoretical definition; nor do the friendships of the past necessarily leave traces that might allow us to elaborate a model of historical friendship from evidence. It is doubtless both the challenge and the possibilities promised by these problematic aspects of friendship that have made it such a productive field of research, across a number of disciplines, in the last twenty years.