État: Bon état
Remarques: Ancien livre de bibliothèque; présence d'étampes, d'autocollants, de code-barres, de feuillet de circulation. Reliure de bibliothèque en très bon état. Pages légèrement jaunies mais propres; quelques pages légèrement ondulées en début de livre. Texte sans annotations. Reliure solide.
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Peter France | Philosophie | Cambridge University Press | Date de parution: 1987 | ISBN-13: 9780521328036 | Couverture: Rigide | Anglais | 113 pages
"This frank and bold expression of the purest of souls...", "This unparalleled monument of vanity and folly." Such were two contemporary reactions to the Confessions. Rousseau's autobiography is certainly one of the landmarks of modern literature; from the beginning, like its author, it has had the power to divide people, to provoke love or hate, admiration or contempt. This faces the reader with problems different from those normally encountered in reading literary works. I shall discuss these in chapter 5, but before withdrawing to this distance, I shall try to enter Rousseau's world, outlining the context, composition and aims of the Confessions in chapters 1 and 2, and analysing the work from the double point of view of form and meaning in chapters 3 and 4.
In what follows, I assume that readers are already reasonably familiar with the Confessions. Quotations from the text are given in my own translation; in the section dealing with Rousseau's use of language I also quote longer passages in French, and would urge any reader who knows French to read the original, since Rousseau is one of the masters of the language. Page references are to the standard French editions, the four volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade Oeuvres complètes under the general editorship of Marcel Raymond and Bernard Gagnebin (quoted thus: I, 235) and the complete correspondence, edited by Ralph Leigh and published by the Voltaire Foundation (quoted thus: Corr. XXX, 35).
It will be obvious how much I am indebted to a number of scholars and critics; my thanks go also to those friends with whom I have discussed questions raised in the following pages, and particularly to John Renwick and Sian Reynolds, who have read drafts of this book and helped me with their comments.
PETER FRANCE
