Roy Wolper (born 1931) is an American scholar and writer. A full-time professor at Temple University from 1967 to 1998, and a writer of fiction, he co-founded The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats , a review journal for English literature, and served as its editor for nearly fifty years.
Wolper was born in Pittsburgh and attended the University of Pittsburgh, earning his Ph.D. in English in 1965, with a dissertation called Samuel Johnson and the Drama. [1] He taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh as an instructor. He became an assistant professor position at the University of Saskatchewan, and two years later, he took a position at Temple University in Philadelphia.[ citation needed ] He retired as a full professor in 1998 [2] and was granted emeritus status from Temple in 2001. [3]
His published scholarship focuses on English and French eighteenth-century literature, including work on Alexander Pope, [4] Jewish studies [5] and antisemitism, [6] and Voltaire. His essay "Candide, Gull in the Garden?", [7] in which he argued that one should not confuse the "limited vision" of Candide 's main character with Voltaire's much broader one, [8] is cited with approbation in Nicholas Cronk's edition of Candide. [9] The article raised quite a stir, with one critic saying it contained some "provocative insights", and "challenged the generally positive interpretation" of the ending of Candide, even while not accepting the argument. [10] His hermeneutical argument is analyzed in a journal article on how to teach Candide, [11] and is surveyed in the MLA Approaches to Teaching Voltaire's Candide. [12]
Wolper also wrote short stories published in University of Texas Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, The Available Press: Pen Short Story Collection, Short Story International, and elsewhere. His stories were also broadcast on the BBC (“The Death Man,” chosen as one of the best stories from 1985 and rebroadcast five times), CBC, NZBC, and SABC. He won the Doubleday Option prize and the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for Creative Writing. A personal essay of his was published in the New York Times . [13]
Wolper is perhaps best known in the field of eighteenth-century literary scholarship as a founder and coeditor (along with Peter A. Tasch and Arthur J. Weitzman [14] ) of The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats , an eighteenth-century review journal, from 1968 to 2017. [3] During this time, the journal expanded beyond reviewing scholarship concerning the early eighteenth-century Scriblerians to include the Kit-Cat Club (a change reflected in the journal's title) in addition to the period’s major novelists (Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne). An active critic on the journal, he had reviewed a over 1500 articles and books by 2017.
During his decades as coeditor of The Scriblerian, Wolper gained a reputation for hands-on copyediting, and a tribute in the journal notes "Roy could be merciless with copy"; he was praised for maintaining high academic standards for critical reviews, which the tribute noted is "so much more desirable and useful to our readers than the laudatory and obscurantist blurbs that book reviewing has too often become". [3]
Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: Optimism (1947). It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes Candide with, if not rejecting Leibnizian optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds".
François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plumeVoltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity—especially the Roman Catholic Church—and of slavery, as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1708.
The Kit-Cat Club was an early 18th-century English club in London with strong political and literary associations. Members of the club were committed Whigs. They met at the Trumpet tavern in London and at Water Oakley in the Berkshire countryside.
The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of authors, based in London, that came together in the early 18th century. They were prominent figures in the Augustan Age of English letters. The nucleus of the club included the satirists Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Other members were John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Henry St. John and Thomas Parnell. The group was founded in 1714 and lasted until the death of the founders, finally ending in 1745. Pope and Swift are the two members whose reputations and work have the most long-lasting influence. Working collaboratively, the group created the persona of Martinus Scriblerus, through whose writings they accomplished their satirical aims. Very little of this material, however, was published until the 1740s. Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer occasionally joined the club for meetings, though he is not known to have contributed to their literary output. He, along with Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, contributed to the literary productions of the club.
An epilogue or epilog is a piece of writing at the end of a work of literature, usually used to bring closure to the work. It is presented from the perspective of within the story. When the author steps in and speaks directly to the reader, that is more properly considered an afterword. The opposite is a prologue—a piece of writing at the beginning of a work of literature or drama, usually used to open the story and capture interest. Some genres, for example television programs and video games, call the epilogue an "outro" patterned on the use of "intro" for "introduction".
Roger Pearson is a professor of French at the University of Oxford and a fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. His research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth century French literature and has worked particularly on Voltaire, Stendhal, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant and Stéphane Mallarmé. Pearson has also worked as a French to English translator.
The Voltaire Foundation is a research department of the University of Oxford, founded by Theodore Besterman in the 1970s. It publishes the definitive edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire, as well as Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, a monograph series devoted to the eighteenth century, and the correspondences (letters) of several key French thinkers. Directed by Professor Nicholas Cronk, it forms part of Oxford's Humanities Division.
Socrates is a 1759 French play in three acts written by Voltaire. It is set in Ancient Greece during the events just before the trial and death of Greek philosopher Socrates. It is heavy with satire specifically at government authority and organized religion. The main characters besides the titular role is that of the priest Anitus, his entourage, Socrates' wife Xantippe, several judges, and some children Socrates has adopted as his own.
Edward M. Langille has been a professor of Modern Languages at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia since 1989. He specializes in the area of Enlightenment studies, and is one of Truro’s leading experts on Voltaire and his works. He is the North American correspondent for Société des études voltairiennes, an international organization that promotes and coordinates research, events and publications relating to Voltaire. Langille also specializes in studies of Acadian culture and history.
Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment is a monographic series which has been published since 1955. Originally edited by Theodore Besterman, the series now comprises more than 600 books - edited volumes and monographs, in either English or French - on diverse topics related to the Enlightenment or the eighteenth century. Successors to Besterman as editor have been Haydn Mason, Antony Strugnell, Jonathan Mallinson, and the current General Editor, Gregory S. Brown, who took up the post at the start of 2016.
"Le Mondain" is a philosophical poem written by French enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire in 1736. It satirises Christian imagery, including the story of Adam and Eve, to defend a way of life focused on worldly pleasure rather than the promised pleasure of a religion's afterlife. It opposes religious morality and especially the teaching of original sin. Its points echo Voltaire's prose works Lettres philosophiques and Remarques sur Pascal. Voltaire noted a trend against using poetic forms to make philosophical arguments, and wrote "Le Mondain" in deliberate opposition to this trend.
The Age of Louis XIV is a historical work by the French historian, philosopher, and writer Voltaire, first published in 1751. Through it, the French 17th century became identified with Louis XIV of France, who reigned from 1643 to 1715.
La Prude is a comic play by the French philosopher and author Voltaire, written in 1739. It is based on The Plain Dealer by William Wycherly, which in turn is based on Molière's The Misanthrope. It was performed once, in 1747, having been offered to the Comédie-Française but not accepted.
Stephen Jarrod Bernard is an Academic Visitor at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford and a member of University College there. A prize-winning essayist, editor, and bibliographer, he is known mostly for his memoir about the sustained serial, clerical childhood sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton in the 1980s and 90s, his consequent mental illness, and the experimental psychiatric treatment he has received. In 2019 he was a Core Participant at the statutory Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats is a biannual review journal addressing English literature. It covers scholarly essays, book chapters, and books about English dramatists, poets, and novelists, as well as history and culture from the Restoration through the late eighteenth century. The journal also publishes literary and historical notes, including discussion of recent bibliographic transactions pertaining to the period.
Aaron Santesso is a Canadian literary scholar and professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His primary area of expertise lies in 17th and 18th-century literature, with published works cover a wide variety of topics within this broader category. Most notably, Santesso has published numerous works regarding surveillance in regards to literature and societal perceptions. His book, The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood, which was cowritten with David Rosen, details the ways in which literature has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, surveillance and privacy practices since the Renaissance.
George Remington Havens was an American professor of French. His publications on French literature focussed on Voltaire and Rousseau.
Conte is a literary genre of tales, often short, characterized by fantasy or wit. They were popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the genre became merged with the short story in the nineteenth century. Distinguishing contes from other literary genres is notoriously difficult due to the various meanings of the French term conte that span folktales, fairy tales, short stories, oral tales, and fables.
Robert Edward Norton is an American cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in European, and especially German, history and thought from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century.