Denis Vairasse

Denis Vairasse (* around 1635 in Alès ; † around 1700) was a French writer, romance scholar and grammarian.

life and work

Vairasse (English: Veiras) went to England as a southern French Huguenot and wrote his utopian novel History of the Sevarambians (first published in English, then in French) , a critical edition of which has been available in French since 2001.

From 1675 to 1685 he was in Paris and used his foreign language didactic experience to publish a grammar (under the name Denis Vairasse d'Allais) and a French textbook. In 1685 the Edict of Fontainebleau drove him to the Netherlands, but there are indications that he returned to his homeland in the 1990s.

Works

• The history of the Sevarites or Sevarambi , London 1675; The history of the Sevarambians. A utopian novel , ed. by John Christian Laursen and Cyrus Masroori, Albany 2006
• L'Histoire des Sevarambes, peuples qui habitent une partie du troisième continent, communément appellé la Terre australe . Contenant un conte exact du gouvernement, des moeurs, de la religion, & du langage de cette nation, jusques aujourd'huy inconnue aux peuples de l'Europe, 5 vols., Paris 1677–1679, Amsterdam 1715, 1787, Paris 1972, Geneva 1979 (preface by Raymond Trousson), Amiens 1994, Paris 2001 (critically edited by Aubrey Rosenberg); German: A. Roberts history of the newly found Völcker Sevarambes , Nuremberg 1717; Russian 1956
• Grammaire méthodique, contenant en abrégé les principes de cet art et les règles les plus nécessaires de la langue françoise , Paris 1681 (498 pages)
• A Short and methodical introduction to the French tongue composed for the particular use of the English , Paris 1683 (131 pages)

literature

• Emanuel von der Mühll, Denis Veiras et son Histoire des Sévarambes , Paris 1938 (Diss. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1934)
• Michel Rolland, Denis Veiras. Notice biographique, in: Bulletin de la Société du protestantisme français 1977, pp. 273–284
• Pierre Swiggers, 17a. History of grammars and linguistic teachings of Romance languages ​​in Romania, in: Lexikon der Romance Linguistik (LRL), ed. by Günter Holtus, Michael Metzeltin and Christian Schmitt, vol. 1.1. History of Romance Studies. Methodology (Das Sprachsystem ), Tübingen 2001, pp. 476–505 (in French)
• Carole Martin, Imposture utopique et procès colonial: Denis Veiras - Robert Challe , Charlottesville (Va) 2000 (preface by Frédéric Deloffre )
• Pierre Ronzeaud, Rêve géographique et cauchemar anthropologique dans les fictions utopiques de Foigny, Veiras et Gilbert, in: Géographiae imaginariae. Dresser le cadastre des mondes inconnus dans la fiction narrative de l'Ancien Régime , ed. by Marie-Christine Pioffet, Québec 2011, p. 425ff.

Web links

• Literature by and about Denis Vairasse in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries )