Bøger af Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

The author uses fiction to convey the theme that "happiness consists of living according to the dictates of nature and virtue". The novel takes place in the Mauritius and is a classic French romantic novel. Like Rousseau, his friend and mentor, Bernardin de St. Pierre was a great literary apostle of the return to nature. In Paul et Virginie, first published in 1788 in the fourth volume of his Études de la Nature, Bernardin drew on his three-years' residence as a government official in Mauritius for his first-hand description of the exotic scenery of that island paradise. The novel, detached from the ponderous Études, became a European best-seller for half a century. The book was a great favorite with English readers, and helped to establish a vogue for the exotic in fiction.

First published in 1773, this travelogue by French author Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814) is reissued here in the English translation of 1800. It covers the voyage he made via the Indian Ocean islands now known as Mauritius and Reunion, recording details of the plants, animals and peoples he encountered.

This new edition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's play Empsael et Zoraide, presented in a modernised spelling, makes available a text which illustrates his abolitionist stance through its central irony: the masters are black and their slaves white, joining forces in the antislavery debate which reached its height with the French Revolution.