1. The last specialised study of Deburau (the most famous and influential mime actor of all time) in French or English was the biography by Tristan Remy in 1954, Jean-Gaspard Deburau. 2. This book is very wide-ranging: starting with Deburau's Pierrot figure, it discusses nineteenth-century theatre, novels, poetry, society, and twentieth-century echoes in cinema and modern mime. 3. Readers who think they know who and what 'Pierrot' is (and was) will be surprised by what they find in this book; for example, his relation to colonialism and race. 4. There are 26 figures in the book, all of them discussed in depth. 5. Deburau is well-known among scholars, and the wider public know his image even if they can't necessarily put a name to it, but he has never been studied through such a wide range of manuscript as well as published sources, many of them identified for the first time.

The 'ballet d'action' was one of the most successful and controversial forms of theatre in the early modern period. A curious hybrid of dance, mime and music, its overall and overriding intention was to create drama. It was danced drama rather than dramatic dance; musical drama rather than dramatic music. Most modern critical studies of the ballet d'action treat it more narrowly as stage dance, and very few view it as part of the history of mime. Little use has previously been made of the most revealing musical evidence. This innovative book does justice to the distinctive hybrid nature of the ballet d'action by taking a comparative approach, using contemporary literature and literary criticism, music, mime and dance from a wide range of English and European sources. Edward Nye presents a fascinating study of this important and influential part of eighteenth-century European theatre.

'Linguistic' theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as 'aesthetic' theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question 'what is beauty?' Edward Nye charts the way in which a wide range of language theorists answer this question, and how their ideas complement contemporary literary debates about poetry, prose, preciosity, style, and artistic representation in general.

Voici deux cents ans d'ecrits litteraires sur le velo. Edward Nye, professeur de litterature francaise a l'Universite d'Oxford, a reuni les plus beaux textes sur le sujet, a commencer par le premier qu'on ait jamais publie, et c'etait une comedie de 1818, par Eugene Scribe, le celebre auteur de theatre admire de Stendhal. Cinquante-trois autres ecrivains le suivent pour chanter les joies, les douleurs, les peines et les triomphes de la velocipedie: Ernest Hemingway, Antoine Blondin, Emile Zola, H-G Wells, William Saroyan, Maurice Leblanc, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett... La plus etonnante redecouverte d'un moyen de locomotion, d'un sport, d'un art. Quartoze de ces textes sont inedits en francais. Ouvrage illustre.