Voltaire: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works

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.

Síofra Pierse is head of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics and associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCD Dublin. She specializes in 18th-century French literature and history of ideas. She is author of Voltaire Historiographer: Narrative Paradigms (2008), editor of The City in Eighteenth-Century French Writing (2004) and co-editor of The Dark Side of Diderot (with James Hanrahan 2014) and Turmoil: Instability and Insecurity in the Eighteenth-Century francophone text (with Emma M. Dunne 2022). She enjoys working on 18th-century Francophone topics, particularly female writers and Voltaire.