Jean-Françoise de la Harpe

JEAN-FRANÇOIS DE LA HARPE (France, 1739 - 1803).
"Lycée, ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne".
Printer: Ledoux and Tenré, Paris, 1817.
Volume 7 and volume 13 are missing.
In good condition.
Measurements: 13.5 x 9 x 2.5 cm.
Jean-François de La Harpe was an influential French playwright, writer and literary critic of the 18th century. He was educated at the Collège d'Harcourt thanks to a scholarship. His youth was marked by precariousness and dependence, which possibly influenced the bitter tone of his later literary judgments. His dramatic career began with some success thanks to the tragedy Warwick (1763), which earned him the admiration of Voltaire, although his subsequent works did not achieve the same recognition. In general, his theatrical production was limited in quality and repercussion, with the exception of Philoctète and Mélanie, the latter considered a representative piece of the pre-revolutionary spirit, although censored until after the Revolution.
La Harpe also stood out as a feared and combative critic, collaborating with the Mercure de France and publishing incisive reviews that earned him numerous enemies. His reception at the Académie Française in 1776 was particularly hostile. From 1786 he taught an influential literature course at the Lycée de Paris, later published as Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne, in which he shone for his analysis of seventeenth-century authors, although he was reproached for superficiality in his judgments on Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Sainte-Beuve considered him the best critic of French classical tragic theater.