Síofra Pierse – författare

Voltaire’s historical works reflect his own changing roles and preoccupations from conteur to campaigner. His groundbreaking historical output of thirty-eight texts, composed throughout his long career as a writer, is now receiving renewed critical attention.In the first study to explore the whole range of Voltaire’s writings in this domain, Síofra Pierse looks at the irreducible ambiguity of the term histoire, both factual truth and the way it is represented – ‘history’ and ‘story’. She discusses how Voltaire’s theories of history interact with other, more literary considerations, and analyses how a search for truth overlaps with a desire to create a compelling narrative that engages the reader in a deeper, collaborative, and polemical project.In Voltaire historiographer: narrative paradigms, Síofra Pierse brings to light how the philosophe exploits the potential of history not simply to record the past, but to influence the present and shape the future.

Voltaire: A Reference Guide To His Life and Works French author. This Guide offers 21st-century readers a glimpse into the multifaceted Voltaire: the thinker, rebel, writer, exile, and campaigner who became a transnational celebrity in his day. A wide-ranging Introduction situates the prolific author from the perspective of 21st-century readers and critics, both for those new to Voltaire and for those already familiar with his life and works. A Chronology gives a detailed sense of how incredibly active and well-networked the writer was throughout his remarkable 84-year-long life. A Bibliography provides further insight into the sheer enormity and versatility of his writings, whether published, private, literary, philosophical, or personal, with emphasis on the most recent critical works in a long tradition of Voltairean reception and criticism. The extensive main A-Z Encyclopedia section includes hundreds of entries relating to Voltaire’s life, friends, lovers, enemies, exiles, critics, works, theater, poetry, finances, polemics, history, travels, ideas, campaigns, disputes, legacy, posterity and more. As a writer with a towering personality, this Guide shows how the indefatigable Voltaire exercised his quill to put his unique stamp on the vast, flawed 18th-century world around him.

What is turmoil? How may it be captured? What were its manifestations in the eighteenth century? Why does it feel so familiar, even urgent, nowadays?  This volume proposes a completely new ontology of turmoil through study of its incidence and impact in the eighteenth-century francophone context. The interdisciplinary essays in this bilingual volume provide multiple illustrations of eighteenth-century instability and insecurity, as well as subsequent adjustments to a post-turmoil new normal. Each instance illuminates human resilience and the mechanisms of post-turmoil elasticity and adaptation in Enlightenment, revolutionary and post-revolutionary writing by female authors Charrière and Monbart, in publications by male authors Beaumarchais, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chamfort, Dupaty, Raynal, Sade and Voltaire, and also in writing by relatively unknown authors, journalists and critics, who capture the turmoil of the global francophone eighteenth-century world. The topics explored emerge as universal ones, familiar to a modern readership: textual and visual revisionism, symbolism within natural disasters, realignment of beliefs, instability of memory, repositioning of historical narratives, female insecurity, attacks on public figures, post-revolutionary resilience and the impact of exile. Through its unique identification of three key generative indicators for turmoil —phenomenon, paradigm shift, elasticity of adaptation— this volume’s contributors deliver a distinctive, rich and new ontology of turmoil.