Salon, academy, and boudoir : generation and desire in Maupertuis's science of life / Mary Terrall.
Abstract:
'In offering a reading of [Maupertuis's biological works] that takes their [rhetorical] idiosyncrasies seriously, I explore the very productive interconnections among polite conversation, literary gossip, erotic fiction, natural history, experiment, and philosophy in the early Enlightenment.'
Isis Vol. 87 (1996), p. 217-229