โ Scribed by Denis Diderot; Leonard Tancock
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse) is the seemingly true story of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent and take holy orders. A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a scathing insight into the effects of forced vocations and the unnatural life of the convent. A succรจs de scandale at the end of the eighteenth century, it has attracted and unsettled readers ever since. For Diderot's novel is not simply a story of a young girl with a bad habit; it is also a powerfully emblematic fable about oppression and intolerance.
This new translation includes Diderot's all-important prefatory material, which he placed, disconcertingly, at the end of the novel, and which turns what otherwise seems like an exercise in realism into what is now regarded as a masterpiece of proto-modernist fiction.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
First published in an edition of 250 copies only in 1940s France, Count d'Irancy's extraordinary THE NUN is a sacrilegous underground erotic classic which is now translated into English for the very first time. This virulently anti-clerical tale concerns the progress of two young sisters, Agnes and
Conventional Christianity is sharply criticized in a tale about a woman confined to a convent against her will.