Jacques the Fatalist and His Master

by Denis Diderot, J. Robert Loy (Translator), J. Robert Loy (Introduction)

Overview

In J. Robert Loy’s smooth and accurate translation (the first in English except for a privately printed one of 1798), the reader can now discover the originality of Diderot’s witty masterpiece. It is a book that no one interested in the evolution of modern fiction, or the ideas of the Enlightenment, will want to miss.

What happens on the journey? Jacques tells his master his adventures; this story in turn is constantly interrupted by other stories or by Diderot, as narrator, who comes in to tease the reader about the future course of the novel. Diderot is eager to be agreeable, so long as the reader realizes that the fabricator of a novel can as easily proceed in this way as in that. The book foreshadows a number of 19th and 20th century literary techniques, exchanging the rational and classical for shifting perspectives of time, personality, and viewpoint.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393009033
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/17/1979
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1040L (what's this?)

About the Author

Denis Diderot was born at Langres in eastern France in 1713. After graduating in Paris in 1732, he was nominally a law student for ten years, but was actually leading a precarious bohemian but studious existence. In the early 1740s he met three contemporaries who were of great significance to him and to the age: a'Alembert, Condillac and Rousseau, who assisted Diderot in the compilation of the Encyclopedie, which he worked on until its completion in 1773. Interested in the mind-body dichotomy, his work was a bold mixture of science and philosophy. He died in 1784. Translated by Michael Henry with an introduction and notes by Martin Hall

Table of Contents

	Introduction	7
	Jacques the Fatalist	19
	Notes	255