The Nun (Oxford World's Classics) (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of The Nun (Oxford World's Classics) Saturday, August 1 2009.

• 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 succes 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.

Shelfari edited the contributors of The Nun (Oxford World's Classics) Friday, July 24 2009.

• Added a contributor: Denis Diderot: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of The Nun (Oxford World's Classics) Thursday, July 16 2009.

• The Marquis de Croismare's reply, if he does reply, will serve as the opening lines of this tale.