Voltaire, Les Inventions de l'auteur

This is a book about Voltaire’s various devices and strategies for creating different authorial personae. It contains 15 chapters, all in French; two of the chapters are new, the remainder are revised versions of articles previously published, in either English or French. The first section deals with how Voltaire creates different names to both protect and conceal his ‘real’ name. The second, and longest, section, examines Voltaire’s various strategies of publication and authorial postures. The final group of articles looks at techniques for inventing and projecting celebrity. Voltaire dominated his century as a writer, and he has been described as the first European literary celebrity: this book aims to show how Voltaire invents for himself a unique authorial status.