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In 1760, the French playwright Charles Palissot de Montenoy wrote Les Philosophes - a scandalous farcical comedy about a group of opportunistic self-styled philosophers. Les Philosophes emerged in the charged historical context of the pamphlet wars surrounding the publication of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclop die, and delivered an oblique but acerbic criticism of the intellectuals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, including the likes of Diderot and Rousseau.
This book presents the first high-quality English translation of the play, including critical apparatus. The translation is based on Olivier Ferret's edition, and renders the text into iambic pentameter to preserve the character of the original. Adaptations are further provided of Ferret's introduction and notes.
This masterful and highly accessible translation of Les Philosophes opens up this polemical text to a non-specialist audience. It will be a valuable resource to non-Francophone scholars and students working on the philosophical exchanges of the Enlightenment.
Moreover, this translation - the result of a year-long project undertaken by Jessica Goodman with six of her undergraduate French students - expounds the value of collaboration between scholar and student, and, as such, provides a model for other language tutors embarking on translation projects with their students.
In 1760, the French playwright Charles Palissot de Montenoy wrote Les Philosophes - a scandalous farcical comedy about a group of opportunistic self-styled philosophers. Les Philosophes emerged in the charged historical context of the pamphlet wars surrounding the publication of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclop die, and delivered an oblique but acerbic criticism of the intellectuals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, including the likes of Diderot and Rousseau.
This book presents the first high-quality English translation of the play, including critical apparatus. The translation is based on Olivier Ferret's edition, and renders the text into iambic pentameter to preserve the character of the original. Adaptations are further provided of Ferret's introduction and notes.
This masterful and highly accessible translation of Les Philosophes opens up this polemical text to a non-specialist audience. It will be a valuable resource to non-Francophone scholars and students working on the philosophical exchanges of the Enlightenment.
Moreover, this translation - the result of a year-long project undertaken by Jessica Goodman with six of her undergraduate French students - expounds the value of collaboration between scholar and student, and, as such, provides a model for other language tutors embarking on translation projects with their students.
Death in classical tragedy is an ending: a symbolic moment of catharsis, read by the audience according to theatrical and cultural tradition. Yet any stage death is also a non-ending: just one in a series of repeated (re)presentations, by an actor who will live (and die) again. Spanning six centuries and seven countries, this study considers how different dramatic authors have engaged with this tension, examining the representation of death as theme and practice; culturally-inflected symbol and never-ending ending. In tracing how Western authors since the sixteenth century have played with and against classical notions of endings and closure, these essays explore the potential and limits of the physical stage for confronting human mortality.
Jessica Goodman is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in French at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
The death of Honor Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, on 2 April 1791, was a key moment in the early years of the French Revolution. The renowned orator, who had played a major role in drafting the D claration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, succumbed to heart disease aged forty-two. His death prompted the establishment of the Panth on, that secular temple intended to honour the great men of a new, free France. It was also the impetus for a whole range of artistic commemorative creations, including a number of plays, performed or published in the days following his death.
This edition presents three such plays, all of which stage Mirabeau in conversation with other great men and women in the afterlife. It situates these texts in the memorial culture of the period, examining how they relate to other forms of commemoration, how they construct the figures of their protagonist and his companions, why their authors performed this commemorative act, and how the same genre could also subvert the celebratory tone. With an appendix containing a further two previously unpublished plays and a dossier on another lost text, this volume is an important study of the role and value of literary - and especially theatrical - commemoration in the early 1790s.
