Robert Challe

Etudes sur les oeuvres de Robert Challe : les "Illustres françaises", le "Journal de voyage" et les "Difficultés sur la religion proposées au père Malebranche" révèlent un mélange détonant de rire et de goguenardise, et les nombreux aspects originaux d'une époque incertaine qui voit la fin du règne de Louis le Grand et l'aube des Lumières.

A complete survey of Challe's life, works, and influence (especially on the course of the French novel in the 18th century), with a detailed analysis of the diverse technical devices used by this almost-forgotten 18th-century novelist in the creation of his only novel and masterpiece. Les Illustres Franoises.

The authors revisit the idea that Enlightenment spearheaded secularization. This book invites all to look at the Enlightenment religiosity as founded on a merger of religious criticism and heterodoxy.

Cervantes’ now mythical character of Don Quixote began as a far different figure than the altruistic righter of wrongs we know today. The transformation from mad highway robber to secular saint took place in the Romantic Era, but how and where it began has just begun to be understood. Germany and England played major roles, but, contrary to earlier literary historians, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau and the Jansenists scooped Henry and Sarah Fielding. Jansenism, a persecuted puritanical and intellectual movement linked to Pascal, identified itself with Don Quixote’s virtues, excused his vices, and wrote a game-changing sequel mediated by the transformative powers of a sorcerer from Commedia dell’Arte. As an early Romantic, Rousseau was attracted to the hero’s fertile imagination and tender love for Dulcinea, foregrounding the would-be knight’s quest in a play and his best-selling novel, Julie. Sarah Fielding reacted similarly, basing her utopian novel David Simple on the Jansenist concept of quixotic trust in others. Colahan here reproduces and explains for the first time the extremely rare original illustrations of the French sequel to Cervantes’ novel, and documents the fortunes in French culture of the magician at the heart of the Romantic Quixote.