The Enterprise of Enlightenment

The Editors: Terry Pratt is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield and has published widely on French Enlightenment epic poetry and authors of the late eighteenth century.
David McCallam is Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield, specialist in the literature and politics of the revolutionary period and author of Chamfort and the French Revolution: A Study in Form and Ideology (Oxford, 2002).

Published on the occasion of his retirement in honour of his outstanding contribution to French Enlightenment studies, this volume explores those areas of research in which David Williams has excelled and continues to excel: literary criticism, particularly Voltaire, the history of ideas, women and Enlightenment, colonial practices and revolutionary politics. It brings together a collection of essays from some of the most prestigious international names in the field and tackles subjects which expose in all their splendid diversity the enterprise - both innovation and undertaking - of the Siècle des Lumières.

Contents: Haydn Mason: Foreword - Michael Cardy: The abbé Du Bos Reads Addison in The Spectator - Cecil Courtney: Variations on a Theme: 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' in the Writings of Belle de Zuylen / Isabelle de Charrière - Patrick Fein: Crébillon's Use of Humour and Satire in Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit - Robin Howells: Humiliation in Mme de Graffigny - Sylvain Menant: Caylus ou le rejet de la poésie - Malcolm Cook: Philosophy and Method in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie - Philip Robinson: Mme Poivre's Letters to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: Biography between the Lines - David Adams: Slavery in the Encyclopédie - Peter Jimack: Diderot and India - Roger Little: A Black Mayor in 1790 France - John Renwick: Philosophes into Counter-Revolutionaries? The Case of Jean-François Marmontel - Theodore E. D. Braun: Micromégas: Voltaire's Interstellar Conte, a Model for the Future? - David Coward: Le Conte voltairien d'après la Correspondance - Nicholas Cronk: Public and Private Poetry: The Problem of Voltaire's L'Anti-Giton - Simon Davies: Voltaire's Les Lois de Minos: Text and Context - J. Patrick Lee: The Apocryphal Voltaire: Problems in the Voltairean Canon - Christiane Mervaud: Du Siècle de Louis XIV aux Questions sur l'Encyclopédie: Voltaire et l'abbé Jacques Boileau - John Dunkley: Added Value: From Berquin to Johnson; John Bewick's Illustrations to The Looking-Glass for the Mind - Peter France: Teaching Taste - David Smith: Nouveaux Regards sur la brève rencontre entre Mme Du Châtelet et Saint-Lambert - Adrienne Mason: Rekindling La Dispute: Rediscovery and Cultural Transfer - Haydn Mason: David Hume: Paradox and Achievement.