What is the je-ne-sais-quoi, if it is indeed something at all, and how can it be put into words? In addressing these questions, Richard Scholar offers the first full-length study of the je-ne-sais-quoi and its fortunes in early modern Europe. He examines the expression's rise and fall as a noun and as a topic of philosophical and literary debate, its cluster of meanings, and the scattered traces of its "pre-history." Placing major writers of the period...