Heroism and Passion in Literature: Studies in Honour of Moya Longstaffe

This volume, prompted by the publication in 1999 of Moya Longstaffe’s remarkable study, Metamorphoses of Passion and the Heroic in French Literature: Corneille, Stendhal, Claudel, further investigates and analyses the multiple appearances of Passion and Heroism in literature. It pursues the exploration of these themes in a variety of cultures (English, French, German, Spanish), genres, and critical approaches. In addition, the chronological span represented is extremely wide. Contributions range from La Fontaine, Molière and Voltaire to Rimbaud and Camus; from Baudelaire to Beckett; from Wagner to Goytisolo. This very diversity gives necessary context, providing scope for reflection and analysis. Although passion seems timeless, can heroism have any real meaning - apart from an individual and existential one - in our postmodern age? Has a notion at the centre of European culture for so many centuries really disappeared from our intellectual and cultural universe? This volume will be of interest to all students of literature, whatever their critical or linguistic allegiance, since it focuses on the varying manifestations of two vital ingredients of all societies and cultures.

Graham Gargett is Professor of French Culture and Ideas at the University of Ulster. Before working in Northern Ireland, he studied at the Universities of Reading and East Anglia and taught English in France for several years. His publications include Voltaire and Protestantism (Oxford, 1980), a revised version of his doctoral thesis; Jacob Vernet, Geneva and the ’Philosophes’ (Oxford, 1994); and a monograph on the abbé Trublet published in the Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. He also co-edited, with Geraldine Sheridan, Ireland and the French Enlightenment, 1700-1800 (Basingstoke, 1999). He is currently President of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society.