Candide by Voltaire
Readers may also like to sample one of the early English translations: Eric Palmer’s edition of Candide (Broadview, Peterborough, ON, 2009) uses the translation published by John Nourse in London in 1759, Candide, or All for the Best. Readers who would like to read other tales by Voltaire should look at Candide and Other Stories, translated by Roger Pearson (Oxford University Press, 1990; new edition, 2006). There is a fascinating online exhibition “Voltaire’s Candide” (2010) on the New York Public Library’s website (candide.nypl.org).
Readers with knowledge of French should download the free iOS app “Candide, l’édition enrichie,” a joint production of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford. This contains the full text in French, with a range of annotations and other resources to provide context, and it allows you to listen to the text, read by the French actor Denis Podalydès. A recent collection of essays on Candide, showing a wide range of approaches, is Les 250 ans de Candide: Lectures et relectures, ed. Nicholas Cronk and Nathalie Ferrand (Louvain, Peeters, 2013), which contains an extensive bibliography of works in French.
The following books and articles in English will provide further angles of approach to the study of Candide:
Barber, W. H. Voltaire: Candide. London: Arnold, 1960 [excerpted in this Norton Critical Edition].
Bellhouse, Mary L. “Candide Shoots the Monkey Lovers: Representing Black Men in Eighteenth-Century French Visual Culture.” Political Theory 34 (2006): 741–84.
Betts, C. J. “On the Beginning and Ending of Candide.” Modern Language Review 80 (1985): 283–92.
______. “Exploring Narrative Structures in Candide.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 314 (1993): 1–131.
Bottiglia, William F. Voltaire’s Candide: Analysis of a Classic. 2nd ed. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 7A (1964).
Brady, Patrick. “Is Candide Really ‘Rococo’?” Esprit créateur 7 (1967): 234–42.
Braun, Theodore E. D., Felicia Sturzer, and Martine Darmon Meyer. “Teaching Candide—A Debate.” The French Review 61 (1988): 569–77.
Cronk, Nicholas. “Voltaire, Bakhtin, and the Language of Carnival.” French Studies Bulletin 18 (1986): 4–7.
______. “Voltaire’s Candide: Lessons of Enlightenment and the Search for Truth.” A History of Modern French Literature. Ed. Christopher Prendergast. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Dahany, Michael. “The Nature of Narrative Forms in Candide.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 114 (1973): 113–40.
Dalnekoff, Donna Isaacs. “The Meaning of Eldorado: Utopia and Satire in Candide.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 123 (1974): 41–59.
Dawson, Deidre. “In Search of the Real Pangloss: The Correspondence of Voltaire with the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha.” Yale French Studies 71 (1986): 93–112.
Feder, Helena. “The Critical Relevance of the Critique of Rationalism: Postmodernism, Ecofeminism and Voltaire’s Candide.” Women Studies 31 (2002): 199–219.
Fletcher, D. “Candide and the Theme of the Happy Husbandman.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 161 (1976): 137–47.
Francis, R. A. “Prévost’s Cleveland and Voltaire’s Candide.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 208 (1982): 295–303.
Grobe, Edwin P. “Aspectual Parody in Voltaire’s Candide.” Symposium 2 (1967): 38–49.
Henry, Patrick. “The Metaphysical Puppets of Candide.” Romance Notes 17 (1976): 166–69.
______. “Sacred and Profane Gardens in Candide.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 176 (1979): 133–52.
Howells, Robin. Disabled Powers: A Reading of Voltaire’s Contes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. Chapter 4, “Candide as Carnival,” 81–95.
Klute, Susan. “The Admirable Cunégonde.” Eighteenth-Century Women 2 (2002): 95–108.
Langdon, David. “On the Meanings of the Conclusion of Candide.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 238 (1985): 397–432.
Langille, E. M. “La Place, Monbron, and the Origins of Candide.” French Studies 66 (2012): 12–25
______. “Le Roi des Bulgares: Was Voltaire’s Satire on Frederick the Great Just Too Opaque?” An American Voltaire: Essays in Memory of J. Patrick Lee. Ed. E. Joe Johnson and Byron R. Wells. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 240–52.
Leigh, Ralph. “From the Inégalité to Candide: Notes on a Desultory Dialogue between Rousseau and Voltaire (1755–1759).” The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman. Ed. W. H. Barber et al. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1967. 66–92.
Mason, Haydn. Candide: Optimism Demolished. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Morrison, Ian R. “Leonardo Sciascia’s Candido and Voltaire’s Candide.” Modern Language Review 97 (2002): 59–71.
Murray, Geoffrey. Voltaire’s Candide: The Protean Gardener, 1755–1762. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1970. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 69.
Pearson, Roger. The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s Contes Philosophiques. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. See in particular Chapter 8, “The Candid Conte: Candide ou l’optimisme,” 110–36.
Racevskis, Karlis. “Candide’s Garden Revisited, Again: The Post-Modern View of the Enlightenment.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 303 (1992): 307–10.
Scherr, Arthur. “Candide’s Garden Revisited: Gender Equality in a Commoner’s Paradise.” Eighteenth Century Life 17.3 (November 1993): 40–59.
______. “Candide’s Pangloss: Voltaire’s tragicomic hero.” Romance Notes 47 (2006): 87–96.
Sherman, Carol. Reading Voltaire’s Contes: A Semiotics of Philosophical Narration. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1985. Chapter 3, “Candide,” 139–206.
Suderman, Elmer F. “Candide, Rasselas and Optimism.” Iowa English Yearbook 11 (Fall 1966): 37–43.
Temmer, Mark J. “Candide and Rasselas Revisited.” Revue de littérature comparée 56 (1982): 177–93.
Thacker, Christopher. “Son of Candide.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967): 1515–30.
Tucker, Peter. The Interpretation of a Classic. The Illustrated Editions of Candide. Introduction by Giles Barber. Oxford, UK: The Previous Parrot Press, 1993.
Vilain, Robert. “Images of Optimism? German Illustrated Editions of Voltaire’s Candide in the Context of the First World War.” Oxford German Studies 37 (2008): 223–52.
Wade, Ira O. Voltaire and Candide: A Study in the Fusion of History, Art and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Waldinger, Renée. ed. Approaches to Teaching Voltaire’s Candide. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1987.
Williams, David. Voltaire: Candide. London: Grant & Cutler, 1997.
Wolper, Roy S. “Candide, Gull in the Garden?” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): 265–77. For the debate provoked by this article, see Lester G. Crocker, “Professor Wolper’s Interpretation of Candide,” and Roy S. Wolper, “Reply to Lester Crocker,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1971): 145–56.
Wootton, David. “Unhappy Voltaire, or ‘I shall never get over it as long as I live’.” History Workshop Journal 50 (2000): 137–55.
Zagona, Helen G. Flaubert’s “Roman Philosophique” and the Voltairian Heritage. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.
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