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- Title
Nicolas Gueudeville's Enlightenment <italic>Utopia</italic>.
- Authors
Leo, Russ
- Abstract
Nicolas Gueudeville's 1715 French translation of <italic>Utopia</italic> is often dismissed as a “<italic>belle infidèle</italic>,” an elegant but unfaithful work of translation. Gueudeville does indeed expand the text to nearly twice its original length. But he presents <italic>Utopia</italic> as a contribution to emergent debates on tolerance, natural religion, and political anthropology, directly addressing the concerns of many early advocates of the ideas we associate with Enlightenment. In this sense, it is not as much an “unfaithful” presentation of More's project as it is an attempt to introduce <italic>Utopia</italic> to eighteenth-century francophone audiences—readers for whom theses on political economy and natural religion were much more salient than More's own preoccupations with rhetoric and English law. This paper introduces Gueudeville and his oeuvre, paying particular attention to his revisions to Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan's 1703 <italic>Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amérique Septentrionale</italic>. Published in 1705, Gueudeville's “revised, corrected, & augmented” version of Lahontan's <italic>Voyages</italic> foregrounds the rational and natural religion of the Huron as well as their constitutive aversion to property, to concepts of “mine” and “yours.” Gueudeville's revised version of Lahontan's <italic>Voyages</italic> purports to be an anthropological investigation as well as a study of New World political economy; it looks forward, moreover, to his edition of <italic>Utopia</italic>, framing More's work as a comparable study of political economy and anthropology. Gueudeville, in other words, renders More's <italic>Utopia</italic> legible to Enlightenment audiences, depicting Utopia not in terms of impossibility and irony but rather as a study of natural religion and attendant forms of political, devotional, and economic life. Gueudeville's edition of <italic>Utopia</italic> even proved controversial due, in part, to his insistence on the rationality as well as the possibility of Utopia.
- Subjects
FRANCE; UTOPIA (Book : More); GUEUDEVILLE, Nicolas; MORE, Thomas, 1565-1625; ENLIGHTENMENT; FRENCH translations of English literature; LAHONTAN, Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce, baron de, 1666-1716; LAW in literature; NOUVEAUX Voyages dans l'Amerique Septentrionale (Book)
- Publication
Moreana, 2018, Vol 55, Issue 1, p24
- ISSN
0047-8105
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.3366/more.2018.0029