Add this copy of Diderot's Letters to Sophie Volland to cart. $37.77, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1972 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Diderot's Letters to Sophie Volland to cart. $58.45, new condition, Sold by Just one more Chapter, ships from Miramar, FL, UNITED STATES, published 1972 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Diderot's Letters to Sophie Volland to cart. $60.00, very good condition, Sold by ZENO'S rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from San Francisco, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1972 by Oxford University Press.
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Seller's Description:
Very Good jacket. Oxford. 1972. Oxford University Press. 1st English Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0192125516. 225 pages. hardcover. keywords: Europe France Literature Translated Biography World Literature. DESCRIPTION-'Without meaning to, I am doing what I have so often wished for. Why, I said, an astronomer will spend thirty years of his life on top of an observatory, his eyes glued day and night to the end of a telescope, simply to determine the movement of a star, and no one makes a study of himself, no one has the courage to keep an accurate record of all the feelings that agitate his heart, all his sorrows and joys. ' Denis Diderot was one of the most brilliant and fertile minds of the French Enlightenment; among his undoubted masterpieces are the private letters he wrote to an otherwise unknown provincial woman, Sophie Volland. Over many years these two lovers were kept apart by a jealous mother, often for months on end; Diderot, at the height of his powers, poured into these letters his love, his eloquence, his exploring mind, his confidence, and his self-doubt. In them we see the trials and pleasures of domestic existence, the life of literary Paris, the making of the great 'Encyclopedia', the endless discussions and the practical jokes of the radical 'philosophes', and Diderot's final journey to thank his imperial patroness at St Petersburg. In the words of the biographer Arthur Wilson, these letters to Sophie are 'unexcelled in their revelation of a particularly interesting social milieu and of an infinitely rich, complex and humane personality'. Diderot wrote more than 550 letters to Sophie over a period of about twenty years, beginning in 1755. Of these nearly 200 have survived; surprisingly they have never before been translated into English. This selection was made and translated by Peter France, lecturer in French at the University of Sussex. inventory #2805.
