Professor R.A.G. Pearson
Roger Pearson, M.A., D.Phil., F.B.A., Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques
Professor of French, Fellow of The Queen's College
Address: The Queen's College, Oxford, OX1 4AW
Email: roger.pearson@queens.ox.ac.uk
Research
My research interests lie in the field of French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My research has focused in particular, and at different times, on the work of Voltaire, Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, and Mallarmé. Recently holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2009-11) I am currently working on a project entitled 'Moses or Orpheus? The Poet as Lawgiver in Nineteenth-Century French Literature', in which I examine how poets and writers envisaged the role of the poet and the nature and function of the 'poetic' during the period.
Teaching
I teach French language and literature to undergraduates in all years, with particular emphasis on the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. I have lectured on Voltaire, Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola and Mallarmé, and on nineteenth-century French poetry in general. My graduate supervision has focused on nineteenth-century French literature and culture.
Selected Publications
'Prophétie ou invention? Pour une problématique du poète législateur au XIXe siècle', in Les Religions du XIXe siècle. Actes du IVe Congrès de la Société des études romantiques et dix-neuviémistes (26-28 novembre 2009), ed. Sophie Guermès et Bertrand Marchal, SERD, 2011, 22 pp, at http://etudes-romantiques.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/religions.html
Stéphane Mallarmé (London: Reaktion Books, 2010)
(Translator and editor) Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories, Oxford World's Classics, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (London: Bloomsbury, 2005; paperback, 2006)
'"Les Chiffres et les lettres": Mallarmé's "Or" and the Gold Standard of Poetry', Dix-Neuf, 2 (April 2004), 44-60, 
Article Weblink
'Mallarmé's Interior Designs', Romance Studies, 22 (2004), 3-15
(Translator and editor), Zola, Germinal, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2004)
Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004)
(Translator and editor) Maupassant, A Life: The Humble Truth, Oxford World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
(Translator and editor), Zola, La Bête humaine, Oxford World's Classics (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire's 'contes philosophiques' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
Stendhal's Violin: A Novelist and his Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)