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Yet cultural nationalism was also the expression of a genuine desire for truth. This in turn implied the release of feelings that the confidence of the Enlightenment in the power of reason had tended to suppress. Two 18th-century figures tapped this fount of emotion, Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The novels of Richardson, in which innocent girls are portrayed as withstanding the artful seductions of titled gentlemen, might be said to foreshadow in symbolic form the struggle between high cosmopolitan culture and the new popular simplicity. These novels were best-sellers in France, and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse followed in their wake, ...(100 of 156573 words)