Roger Pearson

Praelector Fellow and Tutor in French the Queen's College Roger Pearson

"Voltaire's personal life was as colorful as his intellectual life. Of independent means and mind, he never married, but he had long-term affairs with two women: The first was Emilie Chatelet, his intellectual equal. A renowned scientist married to a French bureaucrat, she died while giving birth to yet another man's child. The second, Mary Louise Denis, his niece, twenty years his junior, remained with her esteemed uncle for the last two decades of his life." "The consummate outsider, a dissenter who craved acceptance while flamboyantly disdaining it, author of countless stories, poems, books, plays, treatises, and tracts as well as some twenty thousand letters to his friends: Voltaire had a long and active life, all for the cause of freedom - his own and others'."--BOOK JACKET.

A Life in Pursuit of Freedom

Voltaire Almighty

This is a comprehensive study of Mallarmé's 'poetry of circumstance', a series of lucid and accessible readings of Mallarmé's verse and prose writings.

The Translation of Silence

Mallarmé and Circumstance

Unfolding Mallarme proposes new meanings in Mallarme's poetry and seeks to present the development of his poetic art as a successful search for linguistic and textual mastery. This development is systematically traced from Mallarme's earliest verse through to 'Un coup de Des', the radically innovative poem which was about to be published in a fine-art edition at the time of his sudden death in 1898. In a series of close readings, Roger Pearson examines Mallarme's poetic output up to and including the central 'Sonnet en yx', which is discussed both in its earliest version and within the context of 'Plusieurs sonnets'. These readings are followed by analyses of other major sonnets, of 'Prose (pour des Esseintes)', and of 'Un coup de Des' itself. The 'profound calculation' on which Mallarme claimed to have based this seemingly random text is here unfolded in all its structural and semantic complexity.

Praelector Fellow and Tutor in French the Queen's College Roger Pearson

Books

Your next favorite book is out there