A Casebook Edition of The Diabolic Tragedy

This casebook edition comprises critical essays about and an English translation of La Diabolique Tragédie. Each essay is an example of what Peter Barry has called ‘Crisis Critique,’ the commentaries ranging from the psychoanalytical, to the feminist, the historicist and the religious. A ‘poème en prose’ dating from the start of the nineteenth century, La Diabolique Tragédie was first published in 2011. It was the work of a forger whose (unrealized) endgame was for the text to be presented to the public of the day as an authentic work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The critical essays represent a series of impressions of different types of literary critics, which – the author hopes – will prove a good match for the forger’s ‘mock Rousseau.’