CandideEdition 4

“Nicholas Cronk’s new edition of Candide offers a fresh look at Voltaire’s most famous literary work. With an updated Introduction and new critical and historiographical essays penned by scholars over the past two decades, Cronk brings to light the most important lesson in Voltaire’s Candide. . . . [M]ost readers will agree that Cronk has accomplished what so many critical editions fail to do: he has provided readers with short, readable essays from a diversity of disciplines, which inspire further enquiry—without seeking to convey impossibly comprehensive knowledge about Voltaire, Candide, or the Enlightenment.”

—LOGON CONNORS, University of Miami, on the Third Edition

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• Robert M. Adams’s translation, which renders French intent in English idiom, preserving the novella’s provocative humor, accompanied by explanatory annotations for a contemporary audience.
• An introduction by Nicholas Cronk, about Candide’s themes and relationship to Enlightenment values.
• A rich “Backgrounds” section, newly featuring excerpts from the influential essays of Alexander Pope and John Locke, and including an article by Gillian Pink, written for this edition, about Candide’s composition.
• Critical essays exploring Candide’s style, genre, satire, and position in the globally commercial and colonial 18th century.
• An updated selected bibliography and, for the first time, a chronology of Voltaire’s life and times.