Product Description

Diderot has been admired as a novelist, philosopher, and encyclopedist, but he is less well known as a writer of short fiction. This volume presents his five remarkable philosophical tales including "This Is Not a Story," "On the Inconsistency of Public Opinion Regarding Our Private Action," and "Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage," as well as "The Two Friends From Bourbonne" and "Conversation of a Father with His Children: or the Danger of Setting Oneself Above the Law," both of which are here translated into English for the first time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2267738 in Books
• Published on: 1992-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 166 pages

From Publishers Weekly
After reading the encyclopedist's collected stories, one only wonders why the French Revolution didn't happen earlier. Written between 1770 and 1772, these five stories reveal strains in prevailing attitudes toward religion, law and society. The first three works--"This Is Not a Story," "On the Inconsistency of Public Opinion" and "Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage "--form a trilogy in which two interlocutors recount examples of the destructiveness of the monogamy and jealousy of "civilized" sexual mores, contrasting them to the healthier erotic dealings of that favorite French model for the "natural man," the Tahitian. In "The Two Friends from Bourbonne" and "Conversation of a Father with His Children," Diderot pits sens commun , often portrayed as casuistry, against the more natural sens propre . Furbank, currently working on a biography of Diderot, has written a succinct and informative introduction in which he positions Diderot (1713-1784) as an heir to both the French philosophes and the English novelists Richardson and Sterne (whom Diderot read in the original) and as a forebear of Goethe and Schiller. Like the stories, it offers a view from the crossroads of one of the most fertile periods in Western culture.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Two positive features enhance this translation. First, it assembles five short stories whose fundamental question is, How does one reconcile both civil and religious ethical codes with sexual instincts, especially when they elicit conflicting behavioral norms? Second, the original texts are those of the authoritative editions of H. Dieckmann (1963), J. Proust (1964), and P. Verniere (1964). All five stories, written between 1770 and 1772, when Diderot was in his late fifties, raise questions familiar to his "enlightened' contemporaries: What is the ultimate court of appeal, society's rules or the individual's needs (i.e., rules of nature)? Should public opinion prevail even if it leads to an individual's death? True to his style, Diderot leaves the ultimate answers to the reader. This is an interesting, scholarly book, but the absence of a selective pertinent bibliography of critical works is regrettable.
- Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern California Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French