Ce commentaire littéral et chronologique de trois ouvrages majeurs de Claude Crébillon: Les Egarements du cœur et de l'esprit, La Nuit et le moment et Le Hasard du coin du feu, met en lumière le triple processus de légitimation, de structuration et de validation d'un topos romanesque très en vogue après 1740, celui de l'amour-goût, appelé à réguler dans un pacte contractuel inédit les contradictions élémentaires entre le désir et le sentiment amoureux.

This study offers a reassessment of the librettist, parodist and critic Nicolas-Etienne Framery (1745-1810) whom scholars have frequently mentioned in passing, but whose career remains little known and poorly understood today. Though Framery was also active as a translator of Italian epic works and an occasional author of narrative, this study considers his work as a dramatist and theatrical critic, and demonstrates his constant concern for progress in French lyric theatre. Framery was one of the generation of librettists to write for the new Comédie-Italienne after 1762, and his enthusiasm...

La place de la Bible dans la correspondance de Voltaire a été jusqu'à présent largement sous-estimée: si les citations sont le plus souvent aisément repérables, les allusions et l’utilisation, plus diffuse, de tout un langage scripturaire n’avaient jamais fait l’objet d’un recensement. Celui qui est réalisé ici montre à quel point les lettres de Voltaire, bien plus que tout autre correspondance contemporaine comparable, sont nourries de références bibliques. Celles-ci abondent non seulement en quantité, mais aussi en étendue: presque tous les livres de l’Ancien et...

Ever since Professor Robert Darnton aroused the interest of all Enlightenment scholars with the publication of ‘The High Enlightenment and the low-life literature in pre-revolutionary France’ in 1971, he has been in the forefront of debate about that period and the French Revolution which followed it. His work has long been an indispensable study for all those who ponder on the nature and evolution of these great movements.  By the mid 1990s, however, it was apparent that Darnton’s far-reaching conclusions on the relationship of the Enlightenment to the Revolution, together with his...

By according a central place to the history of reading, Circles of learning radically rethinks the nature of first-person narrative during this period and reconsiders its relation to the autobiographical discourse. Jenny Mander argues that to understand better both the history of the novel and that of the autobiography we need first to examine the position of the modern reader.  The study begins with a critical analysis of Genettian narratology in order to foreground a number of important presuppositions of twentieth-century reading practices, and it goes on to show how these have shaped...