Voltaire

Roger Pearson

"The story of Candide, a naive youth who is conscripted, shipwrecked, robbed, and tortured by the Inquisition without losing his will to live, is accompanied by four other stories"--NoveList.

Candide and Other Stories

Stéphane Mallarmé

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

A gripping account of British life in the capital city of their Indian Empire, their treatment of the Indian population, and their own reaction to Indian culture - from 1689 when they founded Calcutta, until the early 20th century, when the capital of British India was moved from Bengal to New Delhi. This is a vivid pen picture which reveals the day-to-day life and epic adventures of the kind of people who made Europeans a dominant force in world history. Their attitudes to the native peoples and the rise of racial consciousness are described. First published in 1954, in Calcutta, India, and later reprinted in the USA. Chapters include: Merchant Adventurers; The Early Settlement; Growth and Prosperity; The Rule of the Nabobs; Imperial Splendor; The Merchant Princes; and Victorian Calcutta.

A Social History of the European Community in Calcutta

Eastern Interlude

This concise biography of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) blends an account of the poet’s life with a detailed analysis of his evolving poetic theory and practice. “A poet on this earth must be uniquely a poet,” he declared at the age of twenty-two—but what is a poet’s life and what isa poet’s function? In his poems and prose statements and by the example of his life, Mallarmé provided answers to these questions. In Stéphane Mallarmé, Roger Pearson explores the relationship among Mallarmé’s life, his philosophy, and his writing. To Mallarmé, being a poet consists of a continuous, lifelong investigation of language and its expressive potential. It represents, argues Pearson, a fundamental response to the metaphysical mystery of the human condition and the desire to make sense of it for others. A poet turns everyday banality into prospects of mystery; and a poet, in Mallarmé’s conception, is able to bring all human beings together in heightened awareness and understanding of the “magnificent act of living.” This concise and engaging biography tells the story of a fascinating and utterly unique voice in French poetry, one that was often overshadowed by other Symbolist writers. It is an essential read for students of literature and nineteenth-century France.

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

This book offers the first comprehensive close reading in any language of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Taking full account of his critical writings on literature and the fine arts, it provides fresh readings of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris. It situates these works within the context of nineteenth-century French literature and culture and reassesses Baudelaire's reputation as the 'father' of modern poetry. Whereas he is traditionally considered to have rejected the public role of the writer as moralist, educator, and political leader and to have dedicated himself instead to the exclusive pursuit of beauty in art, this book contends not only that he rejected Art for Art's sake but that he saw in 'beauty'—defined not as an inherent quality but as an effect of harmony and rich conjecture—an alternative ethos with which to resist the tyrannies of ideology and conformism. Contrarian in his thinking and provocatively innovative in his poetic practice, Baudelaire fell foul of the law when six poems in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) were banned for obscenity. In the second edition (1861), substantially recast and enlarged, the poet as alternative lawgiver made plainer still his resistance to the orthodoxies of his day. In a series of major critical articles he proclaimed the 'government of the imagination', while from 1855 until his death he developed an alternative literary form, the prose poem—a thing of beauty and an invitation to imagine the world afresh, to make our own rules.

The Poet as Alternative Lawgiver

The Beauty of Baudelaire

A substantial study of the works of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) that provides fresh and detailed readings of his poetry in verse and prose.

The Poet As Alternative Lawgiver

What is the public value of poetry? How do poets envisage their own role and function within society? How do we? Do poets seek to shape public opinion and behaviour? Should they? Or do they offer alternatives—perhaps sacred alternatives—to political and religious ideologies? Are they what Shelley in 1821 called 'the unacknowledged legislators of the World'? And what might that mean? During the decades immediately preceding the Revolution of 1789 the status of contemporary poetry in France was at its lowest ebb. At the same time the perceived power of the writer to influence public events reached a high-water mark with Voltaire's triumphant return to Paris in 1778. In the course of the next century French poetry enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance and flowering, perhaps its greatest. But what of the poet's public influence? In 1881 the people of Paris processed for six hours past the home of Victor Hugo on the occasion of his 79th birthday, and in 1885 an estimated two million people witnessed his state funeral. But who or what were they acknowledging? Poetry or republicanism? Or perhaps their own power? For with each Revolution that passed—1789, 1830, 1848—French poets themselves felt increasingly marginalised. This study addresses the first part of this story and focuses on the role and function of the poet during the so-called Romantic Period. Beginning with an account of the literary climate in pre-revolutionary France it then maps the changes in that climate wrought by the events of the 1789 Revolution. It describes the new politico-literary agendas set by Chateaubriand and others on the monarchist Right, and by Staël and others on the liberal Left. Against this background it then analyses in detail the poetic output and public exploits of the three major French poets of the period: Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny. The Romantic figure of the poet as prophet and magus is habitually dismissed as a cliché. But by focusing on the role of the poet as lawgiver this book reveals the rich and complex terms in which the public function of poetry was debated in post-revolutionary France - and how amidst the centenary celebrations of 1889, as Romanticism gave way to Symbolism, the poet as lawgiver continued to play a central part in that debate.

The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France

Unacknowledged Legislators

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.

The Development of a Poetic Art

Unfolding Mallarmé

Unacknowledged Legislators presents an original and detailed history of the theory and practice of French poetry from 1750 through to the end of the Romantic Period. It focuses on five major writers of the post-revolutionary period: Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël, who set the most influential agendas for poetry in the Romantic period; and Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny, the three most important French lyric poets before Baudelaire. The Romantic figure ofthe poet as priest and prophet is now dismissed as an uninteresting cliché, but this book demonstrates for the first time how the figure of the poet as lawgiver was central to the theory and practice of poetryduring this period. It ends by pointing to the enduring importance of the poet-lawgiver in post-Romantic and Symbolist conceptions of poetry.

The Poet As Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France

Both critic and writer, Stendhal has now become established as one of realism's founding fathers. Dr Pearson's book maps out, for the first time, the critical reception of Stendhal's two most widely read novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma since their publication in 1830 and 1839 respectively. In part one he provides generous samples of the most important nineteenth-century responses to the novels, almost all of them translated into English for the first time. Part two presents a full range of the most authoritative and influential readings since 1945, which illustrate a wide variety of critical approaches.

Roger Pearson

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