This collection of essays was assembled to honor the memory of the late, eminent Voltaire scholar J. Patrick Lee. It includes seventeen essays by prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France on a variety of topics in French eighteenth-century studies. Essay titles include: A New Genre: l'Opera moral / Moral Opera in Eighteenth-Century France, Voltaire and the Uses of Censorship: The Example of the Lettres Philosophiques, Enlightenment Intertextuality: The Case of Heraldry in the Encyclopedie methodique, Sex as Satire in Voltaire's Fiction, Violence, Levity, and the Dictionary in Old Regime France: Chaudon's Dictionnaire anti-philosophique, L'abbe, l'amazone, le bon roi et les frelons, Greuze's Self-Portraits: Figures of Artistic Identity, From Forest to Field: Sylvan Elegists of Eighteenth-Century France, The Falsification of Voltaire's Letters and the Public Persona of the Author: From the Lettres secrettes (1765) to the Commentaire historique (1776), The Baron de Saint-Castin, Bricaire de la Dixmerie, and Azakia (1765), John Law and the Rhetoric of Calculation, 'Le Roi des Bulgares': Was Voltaire's Satire on Frederick the Great just too Opaque? Voltaire and the Voyage to Rome, Textual liaisons: Voltaire, Pamela and Don Quixote, Les petits livres du grand homme: polemique et combat philosophique chez Voltaire, Sentimental Horror: Enlightenment Tragedy and the Rise of the Genre Terrible, Voltaire and the Comic Genre: Polemics and Rhetoric.
About the Author: E. Joe Johnson, co-editor of this volume, is Associate Professor of French at Clayton State University. A frequent translator of French graphic novels, including the graphics novel renditions of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Johnson is the author of Once There Were Two True Friends: Idealized Male Friendship in French Literature from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2003), the editor of The Adapted Victor Hugo (New York: NBM Publications, 2004), and the editor of a classroom edition of the Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut (Newark, DE: Moliere and Co., 2006). He is currently working on a similar edition of Denis Diderot's La Religieuse and is co-editing a reader containing the multiple versions of the eighteenth-century tale Azakia. Byron R. Wells, co-editor of this volume, is Professor of French at Wake Forest University. He has served as Executive Director of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies since 1997 and has been a member of the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies since that time. He is also past president of the Southeastern Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and of the Rousseau Association. His publications include a monograph on Clarissa and Julie as well as a number of co-edited volumes of essays on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A number of his articles have focused on the writings of Rousseau, especially their political content and language, which remains his scholarly interest.