Selected Publications
- Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
- Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century France, Biblio 17 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2005)
- ed., J.-F. Marmontel and C.-A. Demoustier, ‘Le Misanthrope corrigé’: Two Eighteenth-Century Sequels to Molière’s ‘Le Misanthrope’ (London: Modern Humanities Research Association: forthcoming, 2019)
FRIAS Project
The Misanthrope’s Progress: Hating Humanity in the Age of Reason
My project explores the developing status of misanthropy in the European literary and philosophical imagination from the late Renaissance to early Romanticism. Interweaving material from a range of sources (mostly English, French, German, and Italian), it addresses fictional representations of the misanthrope as literary figure (Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Molière’s Le Misanthrope, Schiller’s Der Menschenfeind) alongside ‘misanthropically’ critical theories of human nature and society (Pascal, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, Leopardi), in the light of theories of misanthropy from Plato to the present day. Intellectually, the period sees a shift from understanding society as containing the corruption and viciousness endemic to an irredeemably ‘fallen’ humanity (Machiavelli, Pascal, Hobbes) to a new, more Rousseauist, sense that society is itself what corrupts ‘natural’ human virtue. Yet as the period thus becomes increasingly critical of social practices and institutions, it remains uneasy with those who articulate such criticisms too starkly. This unease is often reflected in literary depictions of misanthropes. Earlier works like Timon of Athens, Le Misanthrope and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels tend to support their protagonists’ negative assessment of human nature, but typically end up depicting the misanthrope’s self-imposed banishment from society. As the eighteenth century progresses, however, we find a greater attempt to redeem, revalorise, or rehabilitate the misanthrope, often neutralising in the process misanthropy’s radical potential as a mode of social critique.