Bøker av Voltaire

Candide has been delighting readers since 1759 with its satiric wit, provocations and warnings.

At once a story-length Bildungsroman and a philosophical tale, 'Micromegas' is a classic Enlightenment text, and is accompanied in this volume by thirteen other pieces - inlcuding 'Plato's Dream' and 'Memnon' - all in a new translation by acclaimed French specialist Douglas Parmee.

Originally published in 1931 and reprinted many times after that, this book contains the French text of Voltaire's 23 essays on aspects of life in England in the eighteenth century. Wilson-Green includes a biography of Voltaire and an analysis of the letters, in addition to detailed notes on each essay.

Relates the misadventures of a young optimist who leaves his sheltered childhood to find his way in a cruel and irrational world. This novel mocks the suggestion that 'all is well' and challenges us to create a better world.

With an Introduction and Notes by James Fowler, Senior Lecturer in French, University of Kent Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits several targets with fierce and comic satire: organised religion, the overweening pride of aristocrats, merchants' greed, colonial ambition and the hopeless complacency of Leibnizian philosophy that believes 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'. Through this rites of passage story, with his central character, Candide, a nave and impressionable young man, Voltaire attacks the social ills of his day, which remarkably remain as pertinent now as ever.Zadig is a tale of love and detection. Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by this story when he created C. Auguste Dupin in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', a story which established the modern detective fiction genre. The Ingenu recounts how a young man raised by Huron Indians discover the ways of Europe. Nanine is a sharp three act comedy concerned with marital dilemmas. In all these works Voltaire manages to combine humour with trenchant satire in a highly entertaining fashion.

Voltaire's Pocket Philosophical Dictionary is a major work of the European Enlightenment. It consists of a series of short essays, arranged alphabetically, whose unifying thread is an attack on religious and political intolerance. Highly entertaining, its concern with intolerance and its consequences is still relevant today.