This collection of essays was assembled to honor the memory of the late, eminent Voltaire scholar J. Patrick Lee. It includes seventeen essays by prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France on a variety of topics in French eighteenth-century studies. Essay titles include: “A New Genre: l’Opéra moral / Moral Opera in Eighteenth-Century France,” “Voltaire and the Uses of Censorship: The Example of the Lettres Philosophiques,” “Enlightenment Intertextuality: The Case of Heraldry in the Encyclopédie méthodique,” “Sex as Satire in Voltaire's Fiction,” “Violence, Levity, and the Dictionary in Old Regime France: Chaudon’s Dictionnaire anti-philosophique,” “L’abbé, l’amazone, le bon roi et les frelons,” “Greuze’s Self-Portraits: Figures of Artistic Identity,” “From Forest to Field: Sylvan Elegists of Eighteenth-Century France,” “The Falsification of Voltaire's Letters and the Public Persona of the Author: From the Lettres secrettes (1765) to the Commentaire historique (1776),” “The Baron de Saint-Castin, Bricaire de la Dixmerie, and Azakia (1765),” “John Law and the Rhetoric of Calculation,” “‘Le Roi des Bulgares’: Was Voltaire's Satire on Frederick the Great just too Opaque?” “Voltaire and the Voyage to Rome,” “Textual liaisons: Voltaire, Paméla and Don Quixote,” “Les petits livres du grand homme: polémique et combat philosophique chez Voltaire,” “Sentimental Horror: Enlightenment Tragedy and the Rise of the Genre Terrible,” “Voltaire and the Comic Genre: Polemics and Rhetoric.”

In this aambitious account of a much expanded Age of Sensibility, Julie Ellison traces the evolution of the politics of emotion on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 17th to the early 19th century.

The island nation of Iceland is known for many things—majestic landscapes, volcanic eruptions, distinctive seafood—but racial diversity is not one of them. So the little-known story of Hans Jonathan, a free black man who lived and raised a family in early nineteenth-century Iceland, is improbable and compelling, the stuff of novels. In The Man Who Stole Himself, Gisli Palsson lays out the story of Hans Jonathan (also known as Hans Jónatan) in stunning detail. Born into slavery in St. Croix in 1784, Hans was taken as a slave to Denmark, where he eventually enlisted in the navy and fought on behalf of the country in the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen. After the war, he declared himself a free man, believing that he was due freedom not only because of his patriotic service, but because while slavery remained legal in the colonies, it was outlawed in Denmark itself. He thus became the subject of one of the most notorious slavery cases in European history, which he lost. Then Hans ran away—never to be heard from in Denmark again, his fate unknown for more than two hundred years. It’s now known that Hans fled to Iceland, where he became a merchant and peasant farmer, married, and raised two children. Today, he has become something of an Icelandic icon, claimed as a proud and daring ancestor both there and among his descendants in America. The Man Who Stole Himself brilliantly intertwines Hans Jonathan’s adventurous travels with a portrait of the Danish slave trade, legal arguments over slavery, and the state of nineteenth-century race relations in the Northern Atlantic world. Throughout the book, Palsson traces themes of imperial dreams, colonialism, human rights, and globalization, which all come together in the life of a single, remarkable man. Hans literally led a life like no other. His is the story of a man who had the temerity—the courage—to steal himself.

Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. RenŽe L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.