Books in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series

La nature fragmentaire et incomplete des travaux critiques sur la question et son importance intrinseque ont determine l'auteur de ce livre a rouvrir l'enquete sur l'image de la Pologne a travers les oeuvres et les relations polonaises de Voltaire.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

It traces the intellectual genealogy that links Sade to his materialist forebears (d'Holbach, Condillac, Buffon, Diderot, La Mettrie, Robinet, Delisle de Sales) and shows how the germs of cruel pleasure were already present in elements of their work, as much in their rhetoric and stylistics as in their arguments.

The purpose of this study is to assess the importance of Switzerland in the life and writings of Edward Gibbon. Whereas the choice of Lausanne as a place of exile for Gibbon to undo his youthful conversion to Roman Catholicism was largely accidental, the society and intellectual resources of that city, perched on its hills overlooking the shores of Lake Geneva, proved to be of lasting influence for the rest of his life. During his period of exile, he began to write in French his first work to be published, the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature, and the subject of Switzerland was his preferred choice of research until his Grand Tour, in which he renewed his residence in Lausanne for a further eleven months, stimulated the idea of writing a history of Rome. Eventually he decided to retire to Lausanne at the end of his parliamentary career to finish the last three volumes of The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Brian Norman shows that the liberalism of Gibbon's political philosophy in his criticism of Lausanne's subjection to the aristocratic rule of Berne surprised the patriots of the new canton of Vaud when his Letter on the Government of Berne, which is here established as a youthful work of the late 1750s, was posthumously published at the end of the eighteenth century. The author then proceeds to examine Gibbon's other early writings relating to Switzerland, his letters and journals, The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire and his Memoirs in order to show the abiding effect of the society, language, history, constitution and military organisation of Switzerland on his beliefs and assumptions.

Dans sa Correspondance, Voltaire invite a ne pas negliger ses 'petites notes', 'tres instructives', 'fortes edifiantes', 'un peu insolentes' et d'ailleurs 'curieuses'. Ce recueil d'etudes, apres avoir replace la pratique voltairienne dans celle de son temps, analyse ses annotations dans les ouvrages qu'il edite et dans ses propres oeuvres.

Unlike better-known theorists of music such as Rousseau, Framery adopted a progressive stance towards musical theatre and took an active part, in the 1770s, in the introduction of Italian lyric forms into the French theatre world.

Edition critique par Michel Mervaud, accompagnée d'une étude de Madeleine Pinault Sørensen sur les superbes planches de l'ouvrage d'après les dessins de Le Prince. Le récit de Chappe, astronome et académicien, parut en 1768. Sévère à l'égard de la Russie et des Russes, il suscita une réfutation attribuée à Catherine II. Cette édition intéressera les dix-huitièmistes, les historiens, les slavistes, et les comparatistes. Michel Mervaud est ancien élève de l'ENS de Saint-Cloud, agrégé de russe, et professeur honoraire à l'université de Rouen. Son ouvrage le plus récent est une édition critique de l'Histoire de l'empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand de Voltaire (uvres complètes de Voltaire, Oxford). Madeleine Pinault Sørensen, chargée d'études au département des arts graphiques du musée du Louvre, a consacré ses recherches aux planches de l'Encyclopédie de D'Alembert et Diderot et au dessin scientifique au XVIIIe siècle.

Periodicals were an integral part of eighteenth-century European civilisation. This volume brings together original articles in English and French dealing with the press both in the main centres of Enlightenment thought and in such often-neglected countries as Portugal and Sweden. The contributions span the long eighteenth century, from Germany in the 1690s to Britain in the post-Napoleonic era. They cover the full range of the period's press, including manuscript newsletters, political gazettes, learned journals and revolutionary propaganda sheets. João Lisboa and Marie-Christine Skuncke show how periodicals allowed the circulation of news and political criticism even in societies such as Portugal and Sweden, where audiences were limited and censorship was severe; Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre's study of press coverage of the Ottoman Empire shows that news reports gave a picture of 'oriental despotism' very different from the literary construct of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes; Bernadette Fort's essay on art criticism and Martin Stuber's analysis of the correspondence of a learned journal's editor broaden our understanding of the place of periodicals in the period's high culture. The revolutionary era brought major innovations in the press although, as Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke shows, older genres such as the 'spectator' were adapted to the new conditions. Political radicals like Jacques Roux (the focus of Eric Négrel's study) and the German émigré journalists who had fled to France (examined in Susanne Lachenicht's essay) owed their careers to the press. But the press could also serve conservative ends, as Philip Harling demonstrates in his analysis of Tory journalism in England in the early nineteenth century. Placed within a broader theoretical and historical context by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Jack Censer and Jeremy Popkin, these studies expand our picture of the role of periodicals in the age of Enlightenment and Revolution, and suggest important new directions for further research.

This volume has its origins in an international seminar where eighteen scholars representing a number of academic fields were invited to consider the eighteenth-century colonial enterprise from a more global and interdisciplinary perspective. Among the issues that arose then, and that are more fully elaborated here, are: the nature and goals of the many colonial expeditions that were undertaken at the time; the manners and means in which these were carried out; the differences between them; and the similarities that they shared. Relying on a variety of sources that include historical archives, literary texts, travel journals, visual and material artefacts and critical studies, the authors explore eighteenth-century colonialism as it was practised and manifested around the world: Europe, Africa, the Americas, the South Pacific, and Asia. What emerges from their essays is the image of a Eurocentric practice with global implications whose themes, despite the diversity existing among the preponderant colonial powers, were oft repeated. As a result, the essays presented here are grouped into four sub-headings - Representations, Mercantilism, Religion and ideology, and Slavery - each of which is integral to an understanding of colonial and post-colonial theories and of their respective consequences and interpretations. The motives of colonisers, as well as their critics, were both multiple and shared during the eighteenth century. These engendered complex sets of arguments - philosophical, political, economic, and social - which the contributors to this volume examine in detail in such disparate geo-political areas as Mexico and Thailand, Senegal and China.

L'anneau magique qui relie musique et langage délimite un univers insondable dans lequel causes et effets s'enlacent indistinctement. Dans ce néant vertigineux, la galaxie rousseauienne exerce une attirance irrésistible et promet, à l'esprit critique qui ose l'aborder, des aventures intellectuelles passionnantes. L'irréductible auteur des Confessions a justement placé le fléau de sa pensée au point d'équilibre de ces deux pôles, entre musique et langage, une zone définie par le concept de société car, proclame-t-il dans l'Essai sur l'origine des langues: 'les oiseaux sifflent, l'homme seul chante; et l'on ne peut entendre ni chant, ni symphonie, sans se dire à l'instant. Un autre être sensible est ici.' Rousseau réitère dans son Dictionnaire de musique sa théorie de l'exclusivité humaine de la parole et de la musique: 'Quoiqu'il en soit de l'étymologie du nom, l'origine de l'art est certainement plus près de l'homme, et si la parole n'a pas commencé par du chant, il est sûr, au moins, qu'on chante partout où l'on parle.' Autour de cette dialectique de la musique et du langage se sont réunis des rousseauistes et d'autres spécialistes de la musique et du langage pour cogiter la thématique de ces noces infinies et en pourchasser les échos à travers les denses bocages de l'uvre du philosophe-musicien. Leurs textes ici réunis constituent les actes du XIIe colloque de l'Association Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Des Lumieres au Romantisme, la conception aristotelicienne de la poesie epique a fait place a une nouvelle vision de l'epopee comme chant primitif d'une nation, dans une periode ou une nouvelle apprehension de la societe, de son histoire et de son rapport a la divinite se met en place.

Is interdisciplinarity a pressing preoccupation of scholars in France and the UK, as it is in the US?The introduction provides a critical history of interdisciplinarity and outlines the key tensions of university life as experienced by students and scholars in the US, the UK and France.

A study of the correspondence, dialogue and history of ideas during the eighteenth century.

L'objet de cette enquete est de decrire la rhetorique du dialogue comme genre litteraire et philosophique, d'interroger cette double identite, d'en saisir les strategies et les figures et d'en connaitre les enjeux.

This book explores the relationship between Diderot's dramatic theory and plays of the late 1750s and the dramatic practice of G.

There has been path-breaking research, too, in areas which reflect our broadening conception of eighteenth-century studies, from literature of travel to post-colonial writing, translation to the press, popular literature to clandestine manuscripts.

Presents a study of the social history of the Eighteenth century.

No two comedies of Voltaire are alike: the breadth and diversity of his comic dramaturgy in terms of form, technique, theme, characterisation and tone, are revealed in this first critical analysis and systematic reassessment of Voltaire's eighteen comedies in their contemporary theatrical, literary and intellectual contexts.

Presents a literary study.

The shift in the interpretation of eighteenth-century European culture over the last century provokes the questions: what meaning can be ascribed to that notion at the beginning of the twenty-first century?

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.