Literature and History in the Age of Ideas

Essays on the French Enlightenment Presented to George R. Havens

Edited by Charles G. S. Williams

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The title of this volume will immediately suggest to those familiar with the writings of George R. Havens the title of his intellectual history The Age of Ideas: From Reaction to Revolution. It will also suggest to those who know the “livingness” of that history one preoccupation of his scholarship — to clarify the complex interactions of books and ideas with the men, the material conditions, and the institutions of a France evolving &lquo;from reaction to revolution.”

The scope and diversity of this volume — bibliography, the conditions of the book trade, the history of science and of political theory, general considerations of historical writing and literary genres, the evolution of the Enlightenment and its heritages, the individual works of philosophes and men of letters — reflect the long and distinguished career of Professor Havens.

Contributors and their subjects are: “Fontenelle, Perrault, and the Realignment of the Arts,”, by Hugh M. Davidson; “Historical Pyrrhonism and Enlightenment Historiography in France,” by J.H. Brumfitt; “The Diamond of Courtoisie and the Dragonnades of 1681: Valincour’s Vie de François de Lorraine,” by Charles G.S. Williams; “The Journal des Sçavans and the Lettres Persanes,” by Alessandro S. Crisafulli; “From London to Lapland: Maupertuis, Johann Bernoulli I, and La Terre applatie, 1728–1738,” by Harcourt Brown; “Notes on the Making of a Philosophe: Cuenz and Bouhier,” by Ira O. Wade; “Sur les Mémoires de Voltaire,” by Jean Sareil; “Voltaire’s Debt to the Encyclopédie in the Opinion en Alphabet,” by Jeanne R. Monty; “Ulcerated Hearts: Love in Voltaire’s La Mort de César,” by Robert D. Cottrell; “A Reevaluation of Rousseau’s Political Doctrime,” by Virgil M. Topazio; “Literature and the ‘Natural Man’ in Rousseau’s Emile,” by James F. Hamilton; “Rousseau’s Antifeminism in the Lettre a d’Alembert and Emile,” by Richard A. Brooks; “ Diderot’s Supplément as Pendant for La Religieuse,” by Otis Fellos; “Diderot’s Artist: Puppet and Poet,” by Douglas Bonneville; “Une certaine Madame Madin,” by Georges May; “Subterfuges et stratagèmes, ou les romanciers malgré eux,” by Diana Guiragossian; “Censorship and Subterfuge in Eighteenth-Century France,” by Edward P. Shaw; “Bibliographic Notes on the Beaumarchais-Goezman Lawsuit,” by Theodore Besterman; “Lamartine and the Philosophes,” by Arnold Ages; “Stendhal and the Age of Ideas,” by Gita May; “Readership in the American Enlightenment,” by Paul M. Spurlin; “Encyclopedism and Its Conscience: Evolution and Revolution,” by Dorothy M. Mc Ghee; and “A Bibliography of the Writings of George R. Havens.”

Charles G.S. Williams is associate professor of Romance languages and literatures at the Ohio State University.