Cultural transfers between eighteenth-century France and Britain did much to shape the intellectual identity of each nation. But what were the main channels of communication? How did they function? What was their impact? In Cultural transfers: France and Britain in the long eighteenth century a team of specialists focuses on the networks and correspondences on which these exchanges were based, the concrete form they took and the material, political or ideological constraints which governed them. Particular attention is paid to the roles of: intermediaries such as diplomats, scientific institutions, or the Huguenot exiles who played a crucial part in disseminating English scientific, theological and political writings gazettes, learned periodicals, and government-sponsored journals where the French learned about British political debates and institutions translators, who could significantly alter texts in line with their own preconceptions and agendas or the expectations of their readers This multidisciplinary book moves beyond the classic concern with 'influences' of one author or culture on another. It presents a new understanding of the hidden international networks that sustained the Republic of Letters and of the synthesis that emerged through contacts and interaction between French and British culture.

On ne peut penser les Lumieres sans l'auteur du Contrat social et l'Emile, mais on ne saurait cependant nier que Rousseau denonce les 'philosophes modernes' dans les termes les plus forts. Comment donc penser les rapports entre Rousseau et les philosophes? Dans ce volume les specialistes de Rousseau vont au-dela des oppositions figees. Ils montrent comment le 'citoyen de Geneve', a partir de sources philosophiques partagees avec ses contemporains, delimite le champ de la raison et construit une pensee politique rigoureuse, s'imposant ainsi a ceux qui souvent rejettent ses idees religieuses ou sa denonciation des sciences et des arts. Confrontant la richesse irreductible de ses ecrits, les auteurs proposent le portrait intellectuel d'un homme qui construit sa pensee a la fois avec et contre les philosophes, les obligeant a justifier ou a modifier leurs propres convictions face au defi que represente son oeuvre. Figure emblematique de son siecle, Rousseau suscite l'indignation mais oblige aussi a des reexamens difficiles. C'est par l'etude de cette position a la fois centrale et marginale que l'on peut saisir la force de sa pensee et discerner ce qu'elle signifie pour nous.

'Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature' offers the first extended exploration of the cultural impact of the politics of race and antiracism in Britain through focussing on a selection of recent novels by black British and British Asian writers. The study argues that an understanding of how race and ethnicity function in contemporary Britain can only be gained through attention to antiracism: the politics of opposing discrimination that manifest at the level of state legislation, within local and national activism, and inside the scholarly exploration of race. It is antiracism that now most strongly conditions the emergence of racial categorisations but also of racial identities and models of behaviour. This sense of how antiracism may determine the form and content of both political debate and individual identity is traced through an examination of ten novels by black British and British Asian writers. These authors range from the well known to the critically neglected: works by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Fred D'Aguiar, Ferdinand Dennis, Hanif Kureishi, Gautam Malkani, Caryl Phillips, Mike Phillips, Zadie Smith, and Meera Syal are carefully read to explore the impacts of antiracism. These literary studies are grouped into three main themes, each of which is central to the direction of racial political identities over the last two decades in Britain: the use of the continent of Africa as a symbolic focus for black political culture; the changing forms of Muslim culture in Britain; and the emergence of a multiculturalist ethos based around the notion of ethnic communities.

The 2007 manifesto in favour of a "Litterature-monde en francais" has generated new debates in both "francophone" and "postcolonial" studies. Praised by some for breaking down the hierarchical division between "French" and "Francophone" literatures, the manifesto has been criticized by others for recreating that division through an exoticizing vision that continues to privilege the publishing industry of the former colonial metropole. Does the manifesto signal the advent of a new critical paradigm destined to render obsolescent those of "francophone" and/or "postcolonial" studies? Or is it simply a passing fad, a glitzy but ephemeral publicity stunt generated and promoted by writers and publishing executives vis-a-vis whom scholars and critics should maintain a skeptical distance? Does it offer an all-embracing transnational vista leading beyond the confines of postcolonialism or reintroduce an incipient form of neocolonialism even while proclaiming the end of the centre/periphery divide? In addressing these questions, leading scholars of "French", "Francophone" and "postcolonial" studies from around the globe help to assess the wider question of the evolving status of French Studies as a transnational field of study amid the challenges of globalization.

'Women seem to be destined solely for our pleasure. When they no longer have that attraction, they have lost everything' (letter from Diderot to Sophie Volland, 1762). How typical was this view of the 'older woman' in the eighteenth century? What was it like for women of intelligence and sensibility to grow old in such a culture? By studying the correspondences of four prominent women (Francoise de Graffigny, Marie Du Deffand, Marie Riccoboni and Isabelle de Charriere) during their middle and late years, Stewart explores the relation of female aging to respectability, sexuality and power. The author's focus lies in the physical, emotional and professional well-being of middle-aged and elderly women during a time when all the available dignity of age seemed to belong to men. The 'repulsiveness' of growing old was patently a female issue. One of the most emblematic aspects of these correspondences is the often unrequited love of older women for younger men during a period when the common wisdom denied women the right to any feelings except piety. Stewart juxtaposes their letters with representations of aging women in the period's fictional and medical literature. She takes up several canonical, mostly male-authored, texts that purvey this common wisdom, and re-reads them with originality and grace. Through The Enlightenment of age - at once learned, highly personal and entertaining - Stewart speaks to us about the secret lives of older women, and about the ethos of an era.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson's writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson's imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson's work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary representations of space.

Ovid's rarely studied Ibis is an elegiac companion-piece to the Tristia and Ex Ponto written after his banishment to the Black Sea in AD 8. Modelled on a poem of the same name by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, Ibis stands out as an artistically contrived explosion of vitriol against an unnamed enemy who is characterised in terms of the Egyptian bird with its unprepossessing habits. Based in a tradition of curse-ritual, it is the most difficult of Ovid's poems to penetrate. Robinson Ellis's edition remains an indispensable - if typically eccentric - platform for the study of the poem's obscurities. Indeed Ellis deserves the primary credit for bringing Ibis back from obscurity into the light of day.This reissue of Ellis's 1881 edition includes a new introduction by Gareth Williams setting the edition in the context of earlier and later developments in scholarship. Ellis's edition not only made a significant contribution to research into the Ibis, it is an important representative of a particular vein of scholarship prevalent in nineteenth-century Latin study.

This illuminating book traces the development of Scottish women's writing in English from its genesis in the late eighteenth century to its flowering in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hindered initially by the hostility of the Presbyterian Church and the self-serving attitude of the male hierarchy which denied them a proper education, an astonishing number of women found opportunities, in the midst of domestic obligations, to write, and often publish - novels, poetry, diaries, journalism, letters, essays and reportage. Charlotte Waldie and Christina Keith visited, respectively, Waterloo and Flanders in the immediate aftermath of battle. Another intrepid writer, Emily Graves, wrote a memoir of her travels in Transylvania in The Light Beyond the Forest - from which Bram Stoker directly lifted the most blood-curdling elements of Dracula. Others remembered include literary multi-tasker and businesswoman Christian Isabel Johnstone; playwright Joanna Baillie; working-class poets Marion Bernstein and Janet Hamilton; novelist Susan Ferrier; memoirist Anne Grant of Laggan; and writer and scientist Mary Somerville, depicted on the cover, after whom Somerville College, Oxford is named.

The modern encyclopedia was born in the eighteenth century. Although numerous studies have shed light on its evolution, important participants have been neglected. Dennis de Coetlogon's Universal history of the arts and sciences may be little known to us today, but its contribution to the development of the encyclopedia is as compelling as it is paradoxical. Loveland examines the Universal history in its cultural context to provide the most detailed picture to date of the world of British encyclopedias in the first half of the eighteenth century. His lively analysis reveals how Coetlogon: flouted the emerging norms of encyclopedia-writing, combining impartial discourse with harangues, advertisements and personal revelations broadened the scope of the traditional dictionary of arts and sciences towards history, geography and religion included far fewer and longer articles than was customary in alphabetical works championed Christian and politically conservative values, providing a fascinating counter-model to the later French Encyclopedie In triggering the adoption of serial publication by the owners of Chambers's Cyclopedia, and establishing a model for alphabetized treatises taken up by the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Universal history was indeed an inspiration for the modern encyclopedia.

Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, this book celebrates the greatest of English novelists by illustrating some of his abiding preoccupations. Prompted by quotations from the novels and other writings, each themed chapter explores contemporary images relating to salient topics of the Victorian age such as the public entertainments of London and the domestic pastimes of its inhabitants; the coming of the railways (which were to transform Victorian England in fiction and in fact); school life for children, and conditions in the workhouses and prisons which loom so large in many of the novels and which blighted Dickens's own childhood. Dickens was an incorrigible showman, and this book also explores his role as actor-manager of theatrical productions, as originator of the myriad stage adaptations of his books, and as supreme interpreter of them himself in the public readings which came to dominate his later years. Reproducing key extracts from the novels alongside a selection of the original covers as they appeared weekly and monthly in the bookshops, their crucial illustrations and all the paraphernalia of nineteenth-century advertising, is a unique approach which breathes life into the vibrant world of Dickens and his characters.

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is based upon principles differing from those of existing Greek lexica. Entries are organised according to meaning, with a view to showing the developing senses of words and the relationships between those senses. Other contextual and explanatory information, all expressed in contemporary English, is included, such as the typical circumstances in which a word may be used, thus giving fresh insights into aspects of Greek language and culture. The editors have systematically re-examined the source material (including that which has been discovered since the end of the nineteenth century) and have made use of the most recent textual and philological scholarship. The Lexicon, which has been twenty years in the making, is written by an editorial team based in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge, consisting of Professor James Diggle (Editor-in-Chief), Dr Bruce Fraser, Dr Patrick James, Dr Oliver Simkin, Dr Anne Thompson, and Mr Simon Westripp.

The Encyclopaedia britannica is a familiar cultural icon, but what do we know about the early editions that helped shape it into the longest continuously published encyclopedia still in existence? This first examination of the three eighteenth-century editions traces the Britannica's extraordinary development into a best seller and an exceptional book of knowledge, especially in biography and in the natural sciences. The combined expertise of the contributors to this volume allows an extensive exploration of each edition, covering its publication history and evolving editorial practices, its commentary on subjects that came in and out of fashion and its contemporary reception. The contributors also examine the cultural and intellectual milieu in which the Britannica flourished, discussing its role in the Scottish Enlightenment and comparing its pressrun, contents, reputation, and influence with those of the much more reform-minded Encyclopedie.

For a work written more than two thousand years ago, in a society in many ways quite alien to our own, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura contains much of striking, even startling, contemporary relevance. This is true, above all, of the fifth book, which begins by putting a strong case against what it has recently become fashionable to call 'intelligent design', and ends with an account of human evolution and the development of society in which the limitations of technological progress form a strong and occasionally explicit subtext. Along the way, the poet touches on many themes which may strike a chord with the twenty-first century reader: the fragility of our ecosystem, the corruption of political life, the futility of consumerism and the desirability of limiting our acquisitive instincts are all highly topical issues for us, as for the poem's original audience. Book V also offers a fascinating introduction to the world-view of the upper-class Roman of the first century BC. This edition (which complements existing Aris and Phillips commentaries on books 3, 4 and 6) will help to make Lucretius' urgent and impassioned argument, and something of his remarkable poetic style, accessible to a wider audience, including those with little or no knowledge of Latin. Both the translation and commentary aim to explain the scientific argument of the book as clearly as possible; and to convey at least some impression of the poetic texture of Lucretius' Latin.

Recent archival research has focussed on the material conditions of marriage in eighteenth-century France, providing new insight into the social and judicial contexts of marital violence. Mary Trouille builds on these findings to write the first book on spousal abuse during this period. Through close examination of a wide range of texts, Trouille shows how lawyers and novelists adopted each other's rhetorical strategies to present competing versions of the truth. Male voices - those of husbands, lawyers, editors, and moralists - are analysed in accounts of separation cases presented in Des Essarts's influential Causes celebres, in moral and legal treatises, and in legal briefs by well-known lawyers of the period. Female voices, both real and imagined, are explored through court testimony and novels based on actual events by Sade, Genlis, and Retif de la Bretonne. By bringing the traditionally private matter of spousal abuse into the public arena, these texts had a significant impact on public opinion and served as an impetus for legal reform in the early years of the French Revolution. Trouille's interdisciplinary study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of attitudes towards women in eighteenth-century society, and provides a historical context for debates about domestic violence that are very much alive today.

Jean-Louis Wagniere servit Voltaire en qualite de secretaire de 1755 a 1778 avant de defendre sa memoire jusqu'a sa mort. Ses lettres assurent une importante mediation dans notre connaissance de la vie et de l'oeuvre du grand philosophe. Dans cette etude Christophe Paillard rassemble d'importants documents inedits qui apportent des eclaircissements sur les oeuvres de Voltaire et ses strategies epistolaires, ses rapports avec les editeurs, l'installation de sa bibliotheque a Petersbourg et l'histoire de l'edition de Kehl. Or, C. Paillard montre aussi que le temoignage de Wagniere doit etre interprete avec plus de precaution que la critique n'a eu tendance a le faire auparavant. Il fait voir que l'attribution de certaines oeuvres ou les remarques sur l'edition de Kehl doivent etre replacees dans le contexte d'une mise en scene; on decouvre a quel point le 'petit scribe' a assimile et mis en oeuvre les strategies litteraires de son maitre. Dans Jean-Louis Wagniere, secretaire de Voltaire: lettres et documents Christophe Paillard renouvelle l'etude de l'epistolaire et des methodes d'ecriture de Voltaire. Il procure aux specialistes de Voltaire une mine de documents inedits, et, de plus, il nous offre un moyen de les lire.

The 1760s was a pivotal decade for the philosophes. In the late 1750s their cause had been at a low ebb, but it was transformed in the eyes of public opinion by such events as the Calas affair in the early 1760s. By the end of the decade, the philosophes were dominant in key literary institutions such as the Comedie-Francaise and the Academie francaise, and their enlightened programme became more widely accepted. Many of the essays in this volume focus on Voltaire, revealing him as a writer of fiction and polemic who, during this period, became increasingly interested in questions of justice and jurisprudence. Other essays examine the literary activities of Voltaire's contemporaries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chamfort, Retif, Sedaine and Marmontel. It is no exaggeration to describe the 1760s as Voltaire's decade. It is he more than any other author who set the agenda and held the public's attention during this seminal period for the development of Enlightenment ideas and values. Voltaire's dominance of the 1760s can be summed up in a single phrase: it is in these years that he became the 'patriarch of Ferney'.

Includes articles on architecture, cultural history, the 'Luxury debate' in the eighteenth century, Rousseau, and the manuscript of The Life of John Wilkes with commentary and contextualisation.

From concerns of an 'autism epidemic' to the MMR vaccine crisis, autism is a source of peculiar fascination in the contemporary media. Discussion of the condition has been largely framed within medicine, psychiatry and education but there has been no exploration of its power within representative narrative forms. Representing Autism is the first book to tackle this approach, using contemporary fiction and memoir writing, film, photography, drama and documentary together with older texts to set the contemporary fascination with autism in context. Representing Autism analyses and evaluates the place of autism within contemporary culture and at the same time examines the ideas of individual and community produced by people with autism themselves to establish the ideas of autistic presence that emerge from within a space of cognitive exceptionality. Central to the book is a sense of the legitimacy of autistic presence as a way by which we might more fully articulate what it means to be human.

This 11-volume collection contains titles originally published between 1931 and 1992. It examines the genre of comedy, from its roots in ancient Greece, through the centuries, to the relatively modern stand-up variety. The individual titles include the theory of comedy; perspectives on women and comedy; comedy in film; European comedy; Restoration comedy and more. This set will be a valuable resource for those students interested in comedy in both literature and drama.

Originally published in 1973 and 1977 respectively, these two volumes, now available together for the first time examine the history of French drama. The first traces tragedy, from its origins in the sixteenth century through to the last years of Louis XVI's reign. The second covers comedy, from the Renaissance, extending beyond Louis XVI into the eighteenth century and right up to the eve of the Revolution. Accessible to the general reader they would also be particularly useful for students of French drama.

Sade's rehabilitation as a major Enlightenment writer has hitherto not extended to a re-evaluation of his dramatic works. With a theoretical framework inspired by psychoanalysis and dramatic theory, and attentive to eighteenth-century theoretical debates, Thomas Wynn demonstrates the value of these neglected works. This is the first study to consider the nature and implications of Sade's dramatic aesthetic, and to define the erotic quality of spectatorship in his experimental plays. Challenging the assumption that the gaze is sadistic, the author uses insights from film theory to argue that Sade adapts contemporary theatrical texts and practice to create an aesthetic distinct from that of his novels. Rather than replicate the style of such works as Les Cent vingt journees de Sodome, Sade's drama anticipates a masochistic model, as theorised by Theodor Reik and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis of Sadean spectatorship takes a thematic rather than chronological or text-by-text approach. The author argues that Sade, as an atheist materialist, focuses on the structural elements of theatre to produce visual pleasure rather than moral improvement, and that he elaborates an insistently visual dramatic aesthetic, a mode analogous to the linguistic saturation of the novels' tout dire. With reference to eighteenth-century obscene drama, theatre architecture and the history of visuality, the author explores the paradox that Sade's theatre is meant not for the stage, but for the private imagination. His visionary theatre is an example of the late eighteenth-century sublime, an aesthetic of the ineffable and the unrepresentable which, in its emphasis on the survival of the demeaned individual, structurally resembles masochism. Without deforming his technique or strategy, the author shows that Sade's voluptuous theatre - like his fiction - addresses an individual whose sovereignty in a godless world is intimately linked to the independent imagination. This book will be of interest to all those working in eighteenth-century drama and theory of spectatorship.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The first British edition of the novel, published in 1886 by Longmans, Green, and Co., the only edition set directly from Stevenson's manuscript and for which he read and corrected proofs. Deborah Lutz's thorough introduction and detailed explanatory footnotes to the novel. Seven illustrations. A rich and relevant selection of background materials centered on the novel's composition, reception, and historical and cultural contexts, alongside seven of Stevenson's letters. Interpretative essays by Elaine Showalter, Jack Halberstam, Martin Danahay and Stephen Arata. A chronology and a selected bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format-annotated text, contexts and criticism-helps students to better understand, analyse and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda (Hackett, 2015) comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our best source of traditional lore about its members-including, among others, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.