Voltaire
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Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Scholars with Swedish reading ability who study Voltaire and the Enlightenment
- Readers in comparative literature or intellectual history who need early biographical sources
- Readers interested in Brandes's critical method and his discussion of Voltaire
- University teachers and students who need public-domain electronic texts for course or thesis materials
Not a good fit for
- General readers without Swedish who wish to read a biography directly in Chinese or English
- Beginners seeking only a quick, easy overview of Voltaire's life
- Specialist researchers who need the latest scholarship and surveys of contemporary research
Reading tips
- Consult a chronology of Voltaire's life and a list of his major works before turning to Brandes's assessment, to reduce background difficulties.
- Read alongside a Chinese or English biography of Voltaire, noting differences between Brandes's judgments and later scholarship.
- Take separate notes on the works and controversies discussed in the book, for easy reference back to Voltaire's originals and related historical sources.
- If language ability is limited, read the introductory chapters first, then use a dictionary to work closely through key passages.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
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About the author
Georg Brandes (1842–1927) was a Danish literary critic and literary historian. Publicly available information on the details of his life is limited, but the works listed here are enough to show the direction of his writing. He is best known for the multi-volume Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, several volumes of which are included here, dealing respectively with emigrant literature, the Romantic school, the reaction in France, naturalism in England, and Young Germany, which shows that his scope covered literary movements in several European countries. He also wrote a critical study of Shakespeare and a monograph on Nietzsche, indicating an interest in both classic authors and contemporary thought. His writing is distinguished by literary-historical narrative and intellectual analysis, and his substantial body of work has had a lasting influence on the study and dissemination of nineteenth-century European literature.
