An American Voltaire ─ Essays in Memory of J. Patrick Lee

Johnson (French, Clayton State University) and Wells (French, Wake Forest University) collect 17 essays in honor of the late Voltaire scholar J. Patrick Lee, written by prominent scholars from the US, Canada, the UK, and France. An introduction recounts Lee's career and publications. More than half of the essays concern Voltaire and his writings, while the remaining eight essays take up other matters in 18th-century French studies and various types of Enlightenment expression, such as letters, poetry, encyclopedias, and stage works. Some specific topics include moral opera in eighteenth-century France, Voltaire and the uses of censorship, enlightenment intertextuality, sex as satire in Voltaire's fiction, John Law and the rhetoric of calculation, and the falsification of Voltaire's letters. Wells serves as executive director of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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.