These three tales, hailed by Diderot among others, but unpublished for over a century (and in one case for nearly two centuries), are a fictional exploration of Otherness and the intercultural set in the New World, either among native Americans (Abenakis, Iroquois) or runaway slaves in Jamaica befriended by Quakers. They argue powerfully for a reassessment of the philosophe Saint-Lambert, since they represent a significant contribution to the anti-slavery debate of the time and to a consideration of cultural relativity, revitalised by recent postcolonial discourses. This title is Volume 99 in...

This critical edition of Francoise Pascal's epistolary collection Le Commerce du Parnasse (Paris, 1669) highlights a rare, innovative and entertaining work by a woman writer virtually unknown today, but in her time a distinguished playwright, poet and painter. Composed of thirty-seven letters in prose and verse, Le Commerce du Parnasse is part gallant correspondence, part poetry collection, part epistolary novel. Now in its first modern edition, this fascinating text provides new insights into seventeenth-century salon life and the discourses of galanterie and preciosite.This is a volume in...

La Soeur (1645) is one of the liveliest and most successful comedies by Jean Rotrou. It is an ingenious adaptation, long unidentified, of an Italian comedy, La Sorella (c.1584), by the polygraph Giambattista Della Porta. Sometimes it remains close to the original text, while at other times it is bold in eliminating superfluous material and in imparting a convincingly French flavour to the dialogue. The introduction to this new edition assesses the originality of Rotrou's adaptation. The notes are devoted above all to linguistic questions and to the many exotic allusions found in...