Isabelle Moreau

Presentation

My scholarly work is centred on relations between literary and philosophical discourses in early modern Europe, particularly seventeenth-century France. It focuses on two central issues: the interplay between narrative fictions and philosophical discourse; and the circulation of ideas and their textual transformations.

Research areas:

- Seventeenth-century literature and thought; Cultural history and history of ideas, with a special interest in libertinism and free-thinking.

- The status of fiction in philosophy and literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Issues of fiction, rhetoric and make-believe in relation to intellectual history and science.

- Eighteenth century literature and thought; Diderot, the Encyclopedie, clandestine and libertine writing. The Mind-Body Problem in Early Modern Europe. Materialism in thought, literature, medicine and the emerging sciences 1600-1800.

- Early Modern Travel narratives and post-colonial theories.

Page personnelle: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/french/staff/isabelle

Publications significatives

2005 : avec Grégoire Holtz éd., « Parler librement ». La liberté de parole au tournant du XVIe et du XVIIe siècle. Lyon: ENS Éditions.

2007 : « Guérir du sot ». Les stratégies d’écriture des libertins à l’âge classique. Paris, Honoré Champion.

2009 : (ed.) Les Lumières en mouvement. La circulation des idées au XVIIIe siècle. Lyon, ENS Éditions.

2011 : « Hommes, bêtes et ‘Fondins’ chez Gabriel de Foigny », in Seventeenth-century French Studies, vol. 33 n° 1, p. 49-58

2013 : « Figures exotiques du déisme de Mersenne à Bernier », in La Lettre Clandestine, 21, 2013, p. 99-114.