An American Voltaire

Book excerpt: 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’Opéra 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 Encyclopédie méthodique,” “Sex as Satire in Voltaire's Fiction,” “Violence, Levity, and the Dictionary in Old Regime France: Chaudon’s Dictionnaire anti-philosophique,” “L’abbé, 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, Paméla and Don Quixote,” “Les petits livres du grand homme: polémique et combat philosophique chez Voltaire,” “Sentimental Horror: Enlightenment Tragedy and the Rise of the Genre Terrible,” “Voltaire and the Comic Genre: Polemics and Rhetoric.”