SOURCE: O'Brien, Karen. “Voltaire's Neoclassical Poetics of History.” In Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon, pp. 21-55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
In the following essay, O'Brien surveys Voltaire's histories, culminating in a study of the Essai sur les moers. O'Brien situates Voltaire in the early Enlightenment debates about the value and accuracy of history, suggesting that Voltaire used literary techniques to revive the status of history as a serious genre.
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