Peritexts in Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans – Generic Tradition and Epistemic (In)Novation

Abstract

Based on a precise redefinition of the concept of ‘peritext’, the present article analyses two peritextual elements in Voltaire’s comic epic: the preface and the notes. The former is a paradoxical encomium in which the laughing (and laughable) persona of the Benedictine abbot Don Apuleius attempts to construct an author for the main text, who is supposedly more ‘moral’ and ‘orthodox’ than a whole string of illustrious precursors from Antiquity to French classicism. As deployed in the satiric mode in general and in Voltairean satire in particular, the notes continue the satiric structure of the main text and provide essential information. Both preface and notes insert La Pucelle into a long generic tradition of comic-satiric writing. In so doing, however, they refunctionalise this tradition as a vehicle for a new episteme.