Revolution in Language The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France

"...Sophia Rosenfeld's book is...a welcome development.....It is itself an intellectual history, concentrated on the same small number of elites who have already received such intensive examination. Within these limits it ranges marvelously over such different fields as ballet, pantomime, hieroglyphics, telegraphy, and the education of the deaf, but always with a penchant for the theory over the practice. Readers drawn to the Revolution by Simon Schama's palpitating prose will find little drama in Rosenfeld's detailed explications of philosophical debates, and her sinuous, complex sentences. And yet her book represents a significant advance.....Not all of Rosenfeld's claims may survive further research, but her ideas on how to place political languages into a broad historical canvas deserve to have a powerful and lasting influence."Rosenfeld, Sophia is the author of 'Revolution in Language The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France' with ISBN 9780804749312 and ISBN 0804749310.